Synesthesia

A form of grace, the fox slips out of the woods like a apparition. She's come for her apple, early today. I roll it to her, and she eats it on the spot, about fifteen feet away. Dainty, and cute as a button: all possible connotations of foxy. When she leaves, trotting down the driveway, she looks back over her shoulder, a young lady at court in a romance novel. The phone rings and I've won a cruise to the Bahamas, which I politely refuse. Two black squirrels today, and it's a treat to watch them, industrious and agile as they are. One does fall, leaping onto a branch that won't support him, scampers up a tree trunk, looking around in embarrassment. It would have made the highlight reel for "Not Top Ten" things that happened during the week. One poplar tree has lost all of its leaves. It's an odd phenomena, on back country roads, the way a specific tree will lose all of its leaves all at once. It's like a small lake in the road, you can't even see the road. A further note, this happens when there isn't any wind, or they wouldn't collect the way they do. Sudden Leaf-Drop Syndrome. It can actually be a problem if you don't know where the road-bed is. I've sometimes pulled off and waited, to let another vehicle go through first, to see where the verge was. Switch-backs in the mountains, and those damned Cottonwood trees. Late last night, or early this morning, Tuesday, right? I was listening to Bach, an organ piece, a chance find on West Virginia Public Radio. I got a drink and smoked. It was quite dark, coal-mine dark, and the music was washing over me in these dark waves, colors, in the darker, somber reaches of the palette. I don't like yellow, and at some point Mozart is always yellow. Read Nabokov, Speak, Memory. I meant to go down and see B today. If you'd have asked me last night, I would have that said that going down to see B was a priority. I wanted to know, still want to know, how he's handling the teaching load, and what he was reading. He has a true eye on what's worth reading. I was distracted by a salamander, the fox, and the fact that I knew nothing about rabies, and just threw in the towel. Truth be known, I'd rather be distracted. I can see B next time I'm off the ridge, which may be tomorrow because Rodney called and said he's coming to clear brush and I'll need cash to pay him because he's chronically short of cash. One of the first orders of business is clearing the trail to the back of the woodshed. If he comes I could be on schedule for the vague outline I cobbed together last Sunday, what I need to get done before winter. I keep forgetting to pick up back-up batteries for my headlamp and the flashlights, and I need a few quarts of lamp oil, but anymore, when the power's out, I just wear my headlamp and go about my business. People that read a lot, especially at meals, all have an object they use to hold a book open, I use a particular rock, B prefers a swage, I've known people that used small sandbags, little muslin tubes filled with bird-shot, in one case a bronze tee-shaped thing that had been cast for that specific purpose. Hands-Free-Reading we call this. You need napkins, because you have to turn the page. A book I've read several times will have a slight smear, upper right, every three or four pages, when I went back to get a bite of fried chicken. No small achievement, that I can fry great chicken; Aunt Pearl, was a master, the only thing she did different was that she weighted the chicken with a foundry mold. If you splay a chicken part, with the skin attached, and put a weight on top, it fries differently. Chicken skin is somewhat like bacon, in that regard. Later, I can't remember the argument. Does it actually matter who was on top?