Reading Brewer

Dictionary of phrase and fable. Romulus killed Remus and his 'father' Mars carried him off in a fiery chariot. Ops was the Sabine fertility goddess, wife of Saturn, became Rhea. Turned on the radio, to catch the weather. It's supposed to rain for several days, storm fronts, wind, possibly damaging, and hail. B has to go to town, it's the end of the term, he has to collect and grade papers, so he can get me a bottle of whiskey. Otherwise I'm set. It was nice yesterday, sitting in chairs spread around a trestle table loaded down with food. Listening to casual conversation and not saying much. Looking around at the buds and the newly unfurling leaves. Several very good naturalists, a couple of historians, not a group you would necessarily imagine congregated in a pasture, eight kids splashing in the creek. When Drew arrived, with his boy Henry, and another watermelon, the kids all went apeshit, and B carved the new melon into eight pieces with a pocket knife. The kids had watermelon up their noses and dripping down onto their tee-shirts, and there was a bonfire, burning sticks from the yard, in a ring of sandstone collected from the creek bed. The creek was convenient for washing. An afternoon in the country. I was introduced as a friend of the family. Good to be called a person, as I've been spending so much time alone I had begun thinking of myself as what Michel Foucault calls "the author function". The term redneck came up and several people looked to me for a definition, and I told them what I knew from various American Unabridged sources 1. An uneducated farm laborer (usually from the south); and 2. A bigot, usually from the rural working class. Source, American, 1820. It, oddly, doesn't appear, in my two volume Dictionary of Americanisms. But Brewer has an interesting entry. Rooinek (Afrikaans 'redneck'), the name given by the Boers to the British in the South African Wars (1881). A certain literalism in both cases, sunburn. Imagine those pasty white necks that came from an island that never sees the sun, ending up in South Africa. It takes me several hours to tease this out, checking references, going to the 11th Britannica, getting a drink, talking to myself, taking a walk outside between rainstorms. Tomorrow is going to be a big morel day, one of my patches had a dozen or more peeking out of the ground, including a large one that I must have missed the other day, because it's the size of a small banana. I left them all, because the turkeys must be nested up against the rain. A gamble I'm willing to take for twice the yield tomorrow. I was seeing the mushrooms very clearly today and that bodes well. They're difficult to see until you see them. Bird event of the year: I had trapped a few mice and on my daily venture to the outhouse, I tossed a couple on the roof, thinking to give the crows a treat. Heard the crows later and went over to the back door. The crows were perched in trees, complaining, and there was a beautiful Sparrow Hawk, on the roof of the outhouse, tearing a mouse apart. The Nature Network, I watch this channel all the time, go get my binoculars and pull up a stool. I'd rather read Brewer, or watch a Sparrow Hawk, than attend an event of any kind. I can't judge, anything is questionable, but relying on a reflected image might be enough. A terminal mass. Mess. A terminal mess. Wait, I remember talking about this in my sleep.