Not Close

She had asked if I wasn't bored, spending so much time alone. The beginning of morel season? I do have to go town, I think Terry wants me to cook next week, and I'll need to know what day, and how many people, then decide on a menu. But for the nonce, I am fully occupied. Got to town. Portsmouth is 1,000 feet lower than the ridge, so the trip is like traveling through two weeks of spring. Spent an hour at the library, got an oil change, did my taxes, had lunch with TR, picked up supplies; sit in the parking lot and pay my four bills, writing out checks and filling in my return address on a library book, stop at the Post Office, then wend my way home, pulling over often, because everyone goes faster than me. I stop for mushrooms. I stop to look up words in the unabridged dictionary I keep on the back seat. I often stop at roadkill. I actually own one of those orange plastic cones they set out, and a vest that makes me look like part of the clean-up crew. I've never been questioned, so far below the radar, that even had my name been mentioned, it would have been dismissed, out of hand. It's good to be unknown. I can dodge almost anything, it's a habit. Flying shit is a matter of course, what you do is duck down and protect you flank. B came over with a pile of London Reviews. He runs some ideas by me, concerning the remodel of the old house he'd bought down the way. We've both done this our entire lives, reconstructed places that were built of left-overs. We talked a good bit about a table/counter he wants to build, using end-grain poplar for the surface, because he loves the color, but it's a terrible wood to use in that particular way, because the sap-wood is so punky, and he doesn't want to use epoxy, which is what I'd probably use, to get a hard flat surface. At some point we were talking about the grain of wood, the way the heart stands proud of the sap. B looked at me, we were having a wee dram, and said, across the top of his glass, that he knew I would know what he was talking about. Circles where I travel, that's high praise.