Autumn Wind

A steady fall of leaves. An early walk, just over to the head of the driveway and back. Stopped at the print-shop porch and rolled a smoke, sat and drifted off. I need to spend a day splitting kindling and starter sticks, bring maybe a dozen ricks of wood inside, so that the surface moisture will humidify the house. Too warm for a fire so I eat a plain yogurt with a piece of toast, then sit down to do some editing. I get into it, spend most of the day trying to figure out if the words mean what I thought I meant. Play fast and loose with some commas, thinking about the spoken voice. B had said the only thing he didn't like about canned hash was the grease, but if you serve it on a piece of plain toast, with a fried egg on top, and a dollop of salsa, it's pretty goddamn good. A good night trapping mice, I caught three and didn't bother freezing them, thought I'd give them to the crows "fresh". They were sitting out, dead, on a plastic grocery bag, and for reasons that escape me, I decided to dissect one. Mostly what I wanted to know was what was in the stomach. I've taken apart a great many animals, so I don't have a problem with that, and I wanted to know what the mice had been eating. This is a legitimate question. Using a pair of scissors and a sharp paring knife I opened one of them and removed the stomach. This a lot like being in Biology class, but better, because I'm more interested. The contents are mostly grass seed. Nothing that I didn't expect, but still, I wanted to see it for myself. I clean up and take the mice out to the outhouse roof, a treat for the crows when they return to the roost. I suspect they spend their days down at the lake. I'm staying away from town more and more, five or six days at a time, a retraining course for the winter ahead, and it helps me remember things I usually forget. An extra tube of toothpaste, kitchen matches, a back-up grinder of black pepper. A great many things don't go on the list (the endless list) of needed items until you use the last of whatever it is. You need to avoid that situation if you live in isolation, and, also, it's nice to have some creature comforts. Toilet paper, for instance. A couple of years ago I ran out of toilet paper during an ice storm and I had to cut up all the cotton socks with holes at the heel and several old tee-shirts until I could get to town. I wrote the previous sentence, originally, with a couple of commas, over the course of an hour, rather than shoot myself, I took them out. I had to laugh, because I actually enjoy my internal discussion about how meaning is served, what punctuation might do to influence what is actually heard. I read a few pages out loud and they sounded pretty good. Even a half-ass lyric, with a steel guitar, can sound pretty good, your dog and that train. I listen to some Norman Blake, then some Leo and I swear the notes are so perfect that the harmonics cascade. Slack guitar, like Delta Blues, is fuzzy, Mississippi John Hurt, or Son House. I listen to Clapton, or Santana and it's a completely different sound. I'm sorry I never learned to read music.