Fluttering Leaves

A lovely walk, cool morning, an old thin jacket over a tee-shirt. A light breeze and the leaves were rattling. The grouse were about. There's a family near the print shop, where I often sit on the front stoop and watch the world, that hardly pay any attention to me. I've held several of the yearlings (until the mom gets pissed at me), and I wonder where they will spend the winter. This time of year, there's always a falling leaf within your field of view. Totally quiet is an artificial construct, only achieved in a padded room inside a padded box. I've done that and it's interesting, but what I mean by quiet is only sounds of the natural world, which some times is loud enough to wake you in the night. Even in the deserts of Utah, where it is very quiet, you can still hear the raptors and the rock slowly abrading. Natural silence is actually quite noisy. Ronnie gave me a bag of blemished tomatoes, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to cut out the bad parts, and I make a salad with mozzarella and an old balsamic. I forget how much I like this. Sunday, so I read for eight hours, with an hour break to listen to America's Test Kitchen on the radio. A cooking show I enjoy because it's nuts and bolts. B said my fucked-up phone is causing me to write chapters with my paragraphs, which I suppose is true. A cluster of paragraphs could be a chapter, you'd need to define three or four of those words. John Thorne wrote a lovely piece about a sandwich he made with sausage casings. I make a gravy sandwich, usually with a slice of onion, that several people think is the best thing they've ever eaten. But then, I'm a student of gravy. My Mom made a red-eye gravy, from ham drippings and coffee, that was one of the best things I ever tasted; poured on fried potatoes, it would make you sit up and take notice.