Son of a Gun

"...derives from the days when women were allowed to live in naval ships. Children were born in the ship often near the mid-ship gun, behind a canvas screen. If paternity was uncertain the child was entered in the log as 'Son of a gun'." A sleuth, formerly, was the trail of an animal. I knew that a baby swan was a cygnet, but I didn't know the male is called a cob and a female, a pen. There were a pair of swans in a pond near my first print-shop, the headwaters of Quivet Creek on Cape Cod. I used to watch them. When the babies were young one year, the male came out of the water and ran me off, but in so doing had gotten out into the nearby lane and a car was coming. The car had to stop and I sat down laughing at how difficult it is for a swan to get air-born. A lot of flat-foot slapping and flapping of wings. There are black swans in Australia. That Rara Avis of Juvenal unknown until 1800. The chantarelle omelet was fantastic, with a few left over slices of tenderloin, and toast with seedless blackberry jam. I have enough of them left to make a gravy for a small beef steak. I don't have the correct terrain for them on the ridge, they prefer the creek beds, and I didn't feel like going out. Maybe I'll go to town tomorrow and stop at a couple of hollows. When you find them they're usually in large numbers and it'd be nice to fill the dehydrator. Superior winter fare. When I went out today I stayed on the old logging roads, the ticks are terrible. The leaves are turning stiffer, and that lovely susurration of spring and early summer, when the leaves are soft, is turning to rattle. Time to get some things done. I've started collecting fallen oak branches, anything I can break without sawing, and I pack them into two 35 gallon trash cans I use for kindling; and I collect those bone dry sticks of hardwood, completely heart, where a branch or small tree had fallen, been kept off the ground and the sap-wood had rotted off, but the heart is solid as a rock; four to six feet long, two or so inches in diameter, that I can cut easily with the bow saw. I aim to have dozens of these, stacked in the corner of the woodshed, so I can use them to start a very hot fire. This will be the first winter I haven't had to be at work, and I imagine rereading some things I saw as important, Hesiod and dear sweet Emily. Proust, Cormac MaCarthy. Pynchon, George V. Higgins. For the nonce, though, I'm editing myself. I have to say, I made myself laugh today, a page that was very funny. I don't consider myself a comic, and I had almost forgotten how to grin. I correct some punctuation, which has became a passion, and eliminate some adjectives. Fuck a bunch of definition. You know you're in trouble when you start making sense. The reader can always parse meaning. The sleuth. I view it differently now, the way things are constellated. I used to consider the path, now I consider the passage. A trans-gender friend was talking about acceptance. I'm not sure I can buy into that. Sexuality is a serious bump in the road. On the other hand. Below the flood wall I watched a muskrat devour a minnow, and I felt nothing at all.