Plain Stupidity

I stop to help get some horses off the road, yell at them and wave my arms. I know very little about horses, just that they're large and have a mind of their own. I've known a few, but never established the bond I had with a castrated goat in Colorado. You could look for meaning in that. But Clyde was the most perfect Zen teacher of all time. He'd look at you, and chew his cud. You had to question everything you'd ever done. A goat could teach you that. Lovely morning though quite cold and I decide to get into town and back before the driveway thaws. Library. Pub, a beer and a cup of soup, then stop at Kroger, back-up cream and juice, the makings for a ham and bean soup. Easily up the driveway. Ice everywhere, the grader ditch is frozen, and I can see the frozen wet-weather springs on the opposite side of the hollow. After three dreary days it's nice to see the sun. Outside, I collect kindling (any dry branch I can break across my knee) and bow-saw some starter sticks. Then I went back out and walked down the drainage channel Scott had cut to drain the puddles that had been the former frog ponds. It's clear of prickles, because it's recent, though it is filled with leaves, eight inches of leaves. Still, it allows unimpeded access into deep woods, and that's a cool thing; I spend an hour looking at things that are still green, certain ferns amaze me. The under-story is interesting, it's so protected, and I spend hours thinking about that. Walking back home, in a trance, I hadn't realized I'd gotten cold. The fire was out, I needed to rake out the ashes, but first I had to change my socks. It was several hours later before I made a pone of cornbread and ate left-overs. Reading about the Papacy. Bunch of greedy idiots. The early history, before the Papal State, is fascinating. It's like reading about the history of Las Vegas. Urban the VI, Gregory the XI, Pius the II, simony. Fortunately, there was a new world, where we could kill the inhabitants and take over. And by then we had gunpowder. It's a tangle, the 14th and 15th centuries, gunpowder, paper, and printing presses. Walled cities were only ever a stop-gap measure; forget how to farm, and there is no bread. You can eat rats and song-birds, barnacles and sea-bird eggs, but you need bread. Hard winter wheat.