Possessive Case

Another flurry of activity, Rodney splitting up the rest of the tree after a dawn spent hunting. He says he'll haul it tomorrow. Rain all morning then heavy overcast. The air feels very thick outside, but inside, with just a few fires, the house is dry. I'd bought a package of flounder fillets, thinking to pan-fry them, but ended up making fish-cakes because I had some leftover mashed potatoes. I don't like using egg as a binder because then whatever it is becomes an egg dish. I was reading today about conventions in punctuation and how they had been affected by printing. Codifying language was an enormous task. It still is, the way words morph. Good shit is now excellent reefer. More rain, it moves across in waves, like the Mayan sense of time. A carpenter friend called with an interesting building problem: how to fabricate a stringer for a set of stairs ('set' may be the longest definition in the OED) and we talked for nearly an hour. Took a while for me to fully visualize what he wanted to accomplish. Half-log treads that died into a curved plaster wall and a curved stringer that would be fully visible. One way would be to rip the stringer into strips and glue them, in place, into the desired form, which would require maybe fifty bar-clamps and a week of labor. Another, that I recommended, was to walk the woodlot and find a tree with the appropriate bend. I've had great luck doing this, strange as it might seem. On occasion I've carved a small model of the desired piece and carried it in my back pocket. You can usually find what you need. There's an oak tree across the hollow that would work perfectly for a curved set of stairs. Notching the treads into the stringer would be the tricky part. So I think about that, fitting together two natural edges in three-space. I can actually do this, with an electric chainsaw and some chisels. If you scribe a line with a sharp tool you can cut right up against it with an electric chainsaw. I'm pretty good, but I've known masters who could disappear drywall into logs. I'd put that on a par with levitation. Harvey often operated a foot off the ground. Smoke and mirrors. But I do miss those conversations. I needed to get some cash, to square up with Rodney, but I didn't expect to see him as he and B were going to be involved in a fairly complex plumbing issue. Still, I hadn't been out in days and wanted to pick up whiskey and tobacco. Picked up a couple of other things, but the larder is mostly full. Rice and cornmeal and beans, oh my. I have to get to the laundromat and go to Big Lots. I need roasted red peppers in olive oil, and olives, and I can usually get these at Big Lots for half-price. Stopped down at B's on the way home and they were deeply involved in the plumbing issue. I could have figured it out, if I'd wanted to, they were using one well to flush out another well, and they had plumbing parts all over the floor. I just gave B the New Yorker article about Thoreau and left. On the way home I had gotten some onion rings and a vanilla shake, and all I wanted to do was to be quiet, read a book, slurp that last corner of a milk-shake.