Tort

We could argue. We could. I'm sure we could disagree about almost everything. It gets this cold, though, and I tend to forget the point. I nap for a few hours, get up and stoke the stove. I need to stay up for a couple of hours, so I wake Black Dell and go a few rounds. Read some essays. Rereading myself, I stumbled on a sentence that didn't say exactly what I wanted to say, so I rearranged it several different ways, changed the punctuation. I'd add a word, then take a word out. The meaning, if we can call it that, was morphing right at the ends of my fingertips. I was reading the words out loud, rolled a cigaret, fetched a wee dram. While I was at the island, I opened the stove door and looked at the banked coals. It's a lovely thing, stirring the coals, watching a fire rekindle. It engages several senses, and the combination of smells and sounds and vision, the way memory comes alive, is not something we control. I put a couple of logs on the fire. I'm still repeating this set of words (look up 'set' in the OED) out loud, dressed like a homeless person. The stove is so hot I had to make a pan of biscuits, a major distraction. A whole new realm of smells and tastes. When I make a batch of biscuits (which is usually eight) I just leave them out, split them open and toast one, whenever I think about something that would be good on a split, toasted, buttered biscuit. Almost anything is. I never had a biscuit go bad. And I'm still working on this line, trying to make sense. Hours have gone past and I'm still working on the same sentence. Anyone who could move at all would be faster than me. Tom The Slough. I'd better go, serious weather forecast. When I finally woke up the second time, it's five degrees and snowing hard. Winter storm watch until Tuesday morning. It's quite beautiful out but deadly cold. I have to put on full facial covering to go dump the pee pot and the dish water. Supposed to still be very cold tomorrow but partially sunny, and I'll have to restock all the stations of wood. Next year I'll need more of everything, I'd underestimated the demands of being home all the time. The cooking and eating aspect of things has been fine, soups and stews and large fried rice dishes that I can eat for several days, making biscuits and cornbread frequently, dried beans. The isolation is interesting and necessary for me now. I can mimic the actions of a fox digging for a vole, mumble, or even talk out loud, as I was doing last night, teasing the meaning out of a group of words, without calling attention to myself or trying to hold up one end of a relationship. I can turn off the refrigerator and listen to snow settling on leaves. I couldn't be a decent partner right now. And my lifestyle would be difficult for most people to embrace. Not having running water and having to walk in and out on a very steep hill through deep snow tends to be a turnoff. It's hard to imagine a Mrs. Basho. Thoreau, on the other hand, went home on the weekend for a family meal, and the help would do his laundry. Where you place your faith seems to be the luck of the draw, either your mother is Jewish, your father is a Protestant minister, or your best friend is a Catholic. Incredibly, it starts snowing harder. I'm going to go toast a biscuit.