Nothing Gained

Wade in the water. Slog through leaves up to your ankles. I'd be lying if I said I don't miss it. Another day of rain and I don't have to leave the house. The thing about having thousands of books is there's always something to read. The phone is out again, the fire-dead trees on Mackletree are falling at an alarming rate. All the locals carry a chain-saw in their truck, it's free wood after all. The white oaks seem to have been the most susceptible to the fire. So many dead trees still, and where the State Forest sold clear-cut rights, the under-story will explode this year; it'll be fun, watching and exploring, and there shouldn't be many bugs because of the hard winter. I spend the day reading about table manners, Margaret Visser, and Levi- Strauss, make a few notes. Did I mention that male crabs are "Jimmys" and females are "Sooks"? The babies are spat, in keeping with exoskeletal terminology. Sooks are preferred, because of the roe, but the meat is equally sweet. More rain and big winds. I had to sign off for a few hours. An intense squall line and the power flickers out. I just sit in the dark for a while, then get my LED headlamp and continue with my reading. The house shudders in the gusts and I feel like I'm on a boat. If the rain stops, and it's supposed to, with this wind, the driveway would be fine for a trip out tomorrow, and that would be a good thing because it's going to rain for the next few days and I'll need coffee and cream, whiskey and tobacco, and another trip to the library. It's good, as they say, to get your ducks in a row. Phone was out for two days. Didn't make it to town, because I found the first morels of the season. Just a few, but enough to saute for an omelet, with a fried shredded potato patty and a piece of toast, it is breakfast for the gods. The last trip to the Goodwill bookstore I'd made a good haul. Non-fiction, a history of butter (with a couple of chapters on magarine), a history of lemons, and a history of chickens. When I finally looked up it was late afternoon and the phone was working, though its ring was sickly. It was an old friend asking if I was ok, that I hadn't posted in a couple of days, and I told her that yes, I was fine, but that my phone had been out. She buys her morels, at a farmer's market in Seattle; early in the season they're $30-35 a pound, later they drop down to $25 a pound. I tell her to stuff some, with herbs and goat cheese, and to use shavings of hard cheese on top, to melt, and hold them together. There's a history of rice, too, but I'm saving it for tomorrow. I do read ahead. Rice paddies can be very old, the system of leveling, and containing water, goes back a very long way. The Siamese attacked the Cambodian capital, Ankor, in the fifteenth century, and they didn't want to take the time to tear down a city built of solid stone, so they just trashed the irrigation system, it had been in place for a thousand years, and malaria immediately killed off fifty per cent of the population. Everyone else fled to the mountains or the coast. Fickle as we are. You make a judgement call, you can either do this or you can't, and you run off into the underbrush.