Maple Blush

One of those days that start fairly warm and just get colder all day. Rain in the morning, supposed to be snow after midnight. Lovely outside in the afternoon, because the Red Maples are budding out and the and the sides of the hollows are fully flushed. A haze of color. I scarify a few of the branches to get some sweet icicles for making cocktails. McCord has become big in Europe and they're shooting a movie based on his novella. Wonderful stuff. B is feeling good about his work right now, and the work on his house. I need to do some spring cleaning and spend a couple of days doing yard work, muck out the outhouse and dump the composting toilet, and then I'd feel ok about my place in the grand scheme of things. Being focused generates heat for me, allows me to survive a cold spell. Sometimes I have to put my feet in a pan of warm water. I hate cutting off toes with pinking shears, especially my own. I always use dental floss, to sew up anything, my thread of choice. Dental floss is probably the greatest discovery of the last century. Birth control and dental floss. Wind energy and solar panels. If you could bleed off even a small percentage of what happens on the surface of a leaf, you could power the world. Which we could; but there are those vested interests, the Railroad Barons, who stand to gain a fortune. Asses the situation: everyone sells out, it's only ever a matter of price, I could do cost-stress-analysis on this, but it doesn't seem worth the time. What I really wanted was a cheese omelet, a couple of sausage patties, and a piece of toast with marmalade. Keep it simple. I spend several hours, most of a day if the truth be known, thinking about the standards of society. I'm not a good example. I've known that for a long time, but it's not something I dwell on. Yes, I don't have any money, but everything I have is paid for; I don't have any debt, and I can eat well off the land, if I need to. The last two winters, when the hammer was down, I just retreated to my personal tree-tip pit, a burrow I favor, lined with blankets, where I can stay warm enough and read by the light of a candle. The only threat I pose is by extension. I'd walked over to the graveyard, from where I could see another hollow, and it was blushed in Red Maples. There are dozens of places I stop, when I'm walking in the woods, stumps that I remember, places where I roll a smoke, maybe take a wee nip. It's not a standard I'd apply for other people, I don't even apply it to myself, I just try to stay warm and have enough light to read. I need a public library and a food market where I can buy a few things that I don't find locally, but the blush, of that hollow, was a wondrous thing. Being deprived of color for so many months. I could easily draw meaning from that. Red seems like a great celebration. That phenomenon when ice crystals appear in the air looks like glitter. Though glitter is much more difficult to clean up, ice crystals sublimate, but glitter is insidious in the way it inhabits nooks and crannies. As I understand it, they don't put modems in computers anymore, and even if I did upgrade my equipment, I'd need to have an external modem. I've noticed that there does seem to be a weak signal here now, which there never was before, and the guy at Radio Shack mentioned a signal amplifier. I, quite literally, don't know what to do. The foundation I propose, which might be called "Help For Addled Writers" would step in at this point and provide the necessary hardware, or software, or whatever. Dental care, new glasses, a more recent dictionary. HFAW, if I'm elected, would erect huts, in various locations, where idiot writers could wash their hair. And they'd have technical help, for those who never developed beyond the pencil. Free drugs for those that qualified. A certified person to trim fungoid toenails. Free boots, free shade-grown, organic coffee beans, that have passed through the digestive track of a Wombat. Free whiskey and tobacco. A cave for every hermit. Aluminum foil helmets and body armor. Amor. I swear. This budding is particularly important, because it marks a year in which I completely stepped aside. Not so much a retreat as a complete disengagement. Or, rather, being fully engaged in the present. Having no fixed course beyond the things that are necessary, and taking the time to look closely at anything that caught my attention. And I feel fully employed, reading for six or eight hours a day, looking out the window, removing a conjunction and adding a comma, rubbing that itch in my back against a door-jam. And eating well, marrow bones and morels, force meats, various greens cooked with salt-pork and onions, beans, of course, in their endless variety, and hot fresh cornbread. B was talking about ceiling trim, and I explained my theory that no one ever looked up anyway. They don't look down either, other than to assure footing, humans tend to look straight ahead in a fairly narrow band. The height of a door is generally six foot eight inches, the frozen ground is right in front of you. Let's say you're six feet away from the door. Your vision might encompass 90 degrees, one quarter of the known universe at that moment. It's difficult to determine what's real.