Breaking Bud

Conducting a funeral service for the dead fox, it is a male, and probably the father of the kits I should see later in the year, brings ashore a raft of thoughts about death and dying. Fittingly, it's spring, which provides a nice dynamic. I take him down the logging road and slit him stem to stern, so he should be quickly consumed. A good documentary for Swedish television, or wherever that was that everyone watched an eight hour train ride. Imagination pales in comparison. Almost anything might be a good sign or a signal. In the pile of my writing B gave me, there's a section, 20 pages, single-spaced, 42 lines per page, that I actually numbered and stapled together. I'd don't remember collating and stapling copies of this, though I do remember writing it. It was a hard winter and my feet were cold, Black Dell and I were getting along. She allowed me some liberties. I could take her boots off and stroke her ankles, but she knocked my hand aside if I ventured above her knee. Rolling thunder moving in. Rain starts pattering the leaves. When the house starts shaking I turn off the lights and go take a nap. It'll either be better or not later. It's right on top of me now, with lightning, I'd better go. Such a storm. It blew a gale and rained in sheets. The power flickered but stayed on, and I stayed curled on the sofa, facing the bookcase wall, remembering other storms. A thunder and lightning snow storm, with Glenn at the church in Yarmouthport, and one evening in Utah when I cowered under an overhang, eating trail mix and fully expecting to die. Ball lightning rolling up a Ponderosa Pine. When the squall passes it's so quiet I get up and put on some music. The Dead, Ripple. Ozone. Sitting on the back porch, a wee dram and a smoke, the past becomes a dream. Sure, I know I'm guilty, we're all guilty of something, but that doesn't mean you have to stop looking. When I was in town the other day I stopped at the Second Street Dairy Bar and got a footer, sauce, mustard and cheese, and some onion rings, went below the floodwall and watched the river flowing past. Barges pushing upstream. More rain. The river is high and the huge sandbar, just downstream from where the Scioto enters, is no where to be seen. Flood watches everywhere. Pretty good mess of morels and I just have them on toast again, with a pair of frog legs I picked up out of the stranger items frozen case at Kroger, rolled in seasoned masa and fried. The stranger item case, where I always look, is where they keep rabbit, cooked crawdads, duck, and various offal. Many pates had their origin there. First big morel day, I'm going to make one, with veal liver, morels, and ground veal. I need to get a few things in town and get my taxes done. I'm getting whatever I paid last year back, and I was thinking about buying a good bottle of wine and making ox-tail soup. I have an oxtail in the freezer that I need to cook. With roasted root vegetables and a salad of bitter early greens, it could be a decent palliative against the cares and fortunes.