Overcast

Right at the edge of rain all day, it leaks, occasionally, a few leaves bounce around. It's hot, and I just wear boxer shorts and a sleeve-less tee. I look like Basho after a rough night with the rice wine. At some point, I was eating baked beans, out of the can, staring at a comma, this must have been last night, I had rewritten a sentence several times and finally left the comma out, then, a couple of sentences later, when I reread, which I do incessantly, I went back and added the comma, dismissing my earlier criticism. The written word aims at the spoken word and the half-stops are important. Listen to Paula Poundstone or Roy Blount, Jr., language at its most vibrant. Rolling thunder, but it's no threat to me, off to the southeast, so I caramelize a large onion, then keep cooking it, on medium heat, until it's crisp and dry, crumble it, with goat cheese and bacon in an omelet. I have a big scoop of salsa on top, sometimes an avocado. I'd better go, the gods are stirring. Loki bowling with our souls. A Luna Moth dead on the driveway. I have no idea how long they live or why they die. This one I pin to the wall. It's a lovely thing. The green of water lilies and the candles of new growth on spruce trees. It's bewildering, the way a color can drive memory, or a sound, or the way a smell can transport you to another time and place. No mediation. You're driving your car or cooking an onion and suddenly you remember a specific night with a specific person, and the memory is vivid. Smell does it for me, more vividly than the other senses, but I can see that for TR or Michael it's sound, and for Todd and Keri it's always the visual thing. I had this minor epiphany when I was 12 or 13, spending a week with my grandparents, working hard and going to church. Grandpa Tom had taken off his John Deere cap and left it on the chair, gone inside to get a glass of lemonade. I picked up his cap, and smelled the sweat-band. I offer no defense for that. All those mules and manure. I'm not into any spiritual crap, I don't believe in anything, but smelling any hat now, and I always do smell them, reminds me of my grandfather. Old Tom Cobb and his mules. The great early tractors came out in the mid-fifties but they cost almost a thousand dollars and nobody had that kind of money, so mules still did a lot of plowing until well into the modern age. I plowed the middles, in a patch of corn, with a mule, actually a hinney, 1963, she was 50 years old and knew exactly what she was doing. Old Tom had draped the traces across my shoulder and told me that she'd take care of everything. Which, of course, she did. Stopped, in the middle of the day to drink and eat a bucket of sweet-feed, then plowed until quitting time. Think what you want. It isn't a bad tour of duty. The rain drips on the roof, condensation, I think it's completely random. Everyone now, one, two, three. Phone was out, when I went to send, so I'll just keep talking. I went down to the lake, to get cattails and some day-lily buds, and decided that since I was off the ridge I might as well run to the library, stop at Kroger and get another steak. Stopped at the pub, had a beer and a bowl of pretty good ham and bean soup, talked with the help. Someone asked me something about glass, and I told them about the Hopewell nation getting obsidian from North Dakota. A thousand miles is a long way to carry a rock. More evidence of an early civilization in the Amazon basin, which I think must further screw the imagined time line. I've always been suspect of the imagined time line. We know people were in coastal Alaska, on Santa Barbara, inland as far as Illinois, maybe 24,000 years ago. Maybe just scattered groups, but people. Steady moving south, away from the ice, and the Amazon basin is a great place to live off the fat of the land. Bananas, avocados; organic, shade-grown, gently cured leaves, that made me feel strong, again. OK, what's the problem, not that there is a problem, actually, I merely took your left foot for a fire hydrant. It's a simple mistake, not a problem.