Getting Metaphorical

The leaf count is growing, the yard is covered, the driveway, and you can't see the edge of the road on Upper Twin. Leaves and new chip-and-seal (asphalt and limestone gravel), so driving out the back way is noisy. I went into to town for a few things, my firewood vouchers, a few groceries. I made a small batch of loose sausage and stuffed an acorn squash, then had a great sausage and fried potato burrito with salsa this morning. Damned Family Services place is closed on Wednesday. Who the hell closes on Wednesday? So I'll have to make an extra trip to town, but I will, tomorrow maybe, because we're supposed to have out first frost Sunday night, and I'd like to have a nice stack of wood. I need to split wood tomorrow, and I have the remaining oak from last year. I can get by for a couple of weeks just finding wood on the side of the road. Burning dried dung. I drove by Aubry's place, the firewood guy, and the pile of wood is impressive, the size of a football field, twenty feet high in the middle. He has small dump-truck but before he brings that up I want him to bring a load in his pick-up, so he knows where I am and what the driveway is like. It's a completely cash business, other than the vouchers (which are like gold, securities in effect), so I get some cash, in case I need to buy a load before the vouchers come through. I realized I hadn't bought any canned sliced white potatoes, you dry these and they fry up perfectly, and they were on sale 10 cans for $5. I bought 10 cans. Boredom can be an issue, the middle of winter, which is where the fifty or so books I collect during the course of things come into play. Mostly these are hard-bound books that I buy for fifty cents, a bag full, on certain Thursdays, for two dollars. Also I have my hobbies, inserting and removing commas, spending quiet time in my graveyard, micro-waving mice for three raucous crows. When the snow's deep, I back off, I don't have a generator, or a satellite or cable, I often can't access a road, but I've never been snowbound for more than thirty days. Emily lives on Mackletree and took over my old job at the museum, so she has to drive in the long way around every day. She said a sink-hole had appeared where the diversion channel had been used to dump the water from the lake when they were rebuilding the dam and wing-walls. I wonder who pays for the repair. A private company contracted by the state, working in a state forest, and a county road. Word is that CCC bridge, now just one lane and closed to trucks, is going to be converted to a walk and bike trail and that a new bridge is going to built downstream. The old CCC bridge is an almost handsome utilitarian affair. Asphalt paved over the original planks. The superstructure is wood. To walk underneath is a study in decay. Whatever they do, destroy the old bridge and build a new one; or build a new one and convert the old one to a new life, it's going to be very expensive and take a while. An April start, is what I hear, and that would mean Mackletree will be closed most of next summer. Has to be done, the old bridge is rotten, but it's going to be a pain in the ass for maybe a hundred people, the residents in a five mile stretch; but it is also one of the few connecting links over the ridge-line that connects the river with the interior parts of the country. These were important connections, and riverboats burned a lot of wood, stopped at every port-of-call. And the ridge-line 'Sunshine Ridge' runs almost a hundred miles, it's the outwash plain of the last glaciation. Getting goods down to the river was an important part of the local economy. Sending stuff down river, to Cincy. Before Chicago, hog butcher to the world. You can still get great sausage in Cincinnati, and some of the best bread I've ever eaten. End of the season vegetables. A pile of squash, fried green tomatoes, parsnips touched by frost. The conversion of starch to sugar, malted barley to beer, corn to whiskey, is such an elegant solution to storing grain. I was thinking about barrels and coopers, planing the perfect angle on a stave, how perfect a barrel is for rolling from one place to another. Water weighs 62.4 pounds per cubic foot, a five-gallon bucket, interestingly, isn't quite a cubic foot, but a 55 gallon barrel has to weigh at least 600 pounds, and yet you can control it with just a touch. Barrels are oblate spheres, foreshortened footballs, almost any direction is possible. I once found myself in line between Gordon Wasson and John Cage in line at the post office at Wood's Hole; they were arguing about free will, and the idea of rolling barrels came up. They pressed me, I was between them, I had to say something, and I told them you could slake the smell of kerosene with lime. Which is true, you know, if you dump a pound of powdered limestone into a barrel of kerosene, it doesn't stink on your fingers any more.