Field of View

As the leaves fall the field opens. In places I can see across the hollow. George calls, in route to Charlotte; he'd been crewing on a sailboat down in the islands. Now that I have a phone I need to call my daughters, and I need to call Kim, in Tallahassee, to check on his shoulder injury. B has himself nearly squared away, down at the house. He still views electricity and running water as acts of god, beyond the pale, but he got the insulation for his ceiling and he's got it under control. We're both survivors. You figure things out or you die. I spent the afternoon cutting dead young poplars and hauling them to the woodshed. I can make a fire of these. With a single butter wrapper and a smashed pallet I can get us through the night. Good thing I came right home, finished the paragraph in process, and shipped off the pieces I had stacked, because before I could make any calls the goddamn phone was out again. Who's the patron saint of phones? I need to sacrifice some chickens or something. It's the season of acorns falling. I wear a foam pad inside a feed-cap, but a direct hit on any part of the body is painful. A bumper crop this year, and the squirrels are going crazy. Everyone is citing the Farmer's Almanac, the acorns, the caterpillars, saying it's going to be a brutal winter. It's difficult to imagine it being more brutal than last year. Easier, actually, for me; I'll just stay home now. I have a back-up juice, a large tin of coffee, one of those powdered creamers, ox-tails and livers stashed away. Some rice. Not bad work, if you can get it. Two guys from the Guinness dealer were at the pub, there'd been two bad kegs, one was flat and the other skunky. They poured off a pint of the replacement, and left it sitting there. Cory gave it to me. Stopped in the Forest, at one edge of the Big Burn from a few years ago, and found some mushrooms. Stirred a grouse hen. When I got home I made a great stir-fry with shavings of beef and the mushrooms on egg noodles, ate a small avocado with lime juice, a piece of bread. The cacophony sets up outside, a wall of cicadas and the cry of a Whip-O-Will. What's to believe or not believe? I have this chorus, echoing in my head. The natural world is actually quite loud. The wind blows, the acorns fall, sometimes I wear earplugs. You learn to roll with the punches. Orange over night, yesterday was yellow, first major leaf-fall day, brisk, with a gusty wind, fucking acorns sounding like machine-gun fire on the woodshed roof, leaves whipping about. Perfect penultimate day of summer. The wind is in the tops of the trees, they dance like a flapper in a fit of estrus or a young buck in a field where does have peed. A fragrant and vibrant day. Rattlesnakes actually do smell like cucumbers. I saw a mature male headed for the burrow today, they over-winter in the cemetery, in Edna Blevins grave. I looked at Emily's handwriting for several hours, on the back of envelopes, finally just sighed; a last wee dram and rolled a smoke. Tomorrow is just another day.