Cold Again

Chance of frost for a couple of nights. With the forecast rather vague, I went to town to get a few things, coffee and cream, meat and potatoes, water and juice, rice and beans. Excellent corn chowder at the pub, a pint of bitter, and I came home through the forest, stopping and looking for mushrooms. Found a few, but this cold weather will set them back. Soil temperature is everything. I set aside three little beauties that I want to stuff with cheese and shallots. I'll have a few on toast tonight, and have enough left for an omelet tomorrow. Stopped at the library and got some fiction and a book of David Mamet's essays. A woman I know in town brushed by me, eating at the bar, stopped and gave me a peck on the cheek, she said that I looked like a skinny mountain man and smelled terrific. This is good to know, the smell part, because I don't pay a lot of attention. I need to do my end-of-winter laundry and put things away, but I blow it off until my next trip to town. The Redbud is peaking right now, and there's one stretch on Mackletree where there are a dozen bushes in maybe a hundred feet. Takes your breath away. I stopped at the ford, drove backward and forward a few times, to clean the undercarriage, then stopped midstream, rolled a smoke and stared at spring coming on hard along the creek bank. A spray of miniature Iris in the median, a small white flower I've never identified. It shouldn't frost on the ridge, the cold air will sink to the bottoms, and I'll just wrap up in a blanket and turn away from the light. It's easier to just turn your back. More fucking rain, I can't believe it. They should pipe the Upper Mississippi into the mid-west, let it flow down to the Rio Grand, turn it into another California boondoggle. Seriously. The beauty of a water pipe-line is that even a catastrophic failure is just a mud-puddle. I do some calculations, using my hollow as a base line (the math is specious) and I figure that if they all got low-flow toilets and stopped watering there goddamn lawns, I could supply Bakersfield with water. Storing energy, in freeze-dried water, could be the wave of the future; and I'm working on a simple method to capture lightning bolts using pulleys and trees. The rigging would be no more complex than a three-mast clipper, and there would be all of those low-paying jobs, ready about, hard a-lee.