Severe Clarity

This time of year you take any trip to town you can get. I got a piece of veal and a sweet potato in case I end up staying home, but I'll probably go down to B's for Thanksgiving. I picked up a few things, but at this point I'm backing up the back-ups. I went right to the library and got a few things. Justin was at the pub and he poured a free holiday beer. Stopped at the Buckeye Dairy Bar for a footer and onion rings, with a small shake. I like to take this meal home. start a fire, and eat at the island. Quiet when the wind finally dies down, just the sound of cast iron expanding. I set about rereading John McPhee. I have a couple of signed first editions, that I read very carefully, with gloves. Usually, when I have a first edition, I buy a paperback as a reading copy, but in two cases I don't have a reading copy, so I'm just very careful. The plastic handles on my one gallon pot, stainless steel, which I use all the time, broke, and I spent several hours fabricating new handles out of rock maple. They end up being quite comfortable. Tinker Tom. It feels good to solve a problem, to make something you need. I have to haul a load of New Yorkers and London Review Of Books to the recycling center, the piles in the living room are become unseemly, and I need to bring some firewood inside. Supposed to warm up through the weekend, but there's almost always a cold snap between Thanksgiving and Christmas, then survival mode for a couple of months. Firewood, things to read, things to eat, things to drink and smoke; my fall-back position is a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. Sitting in the sun outside, having a smoke, staring into the middle distance, when I hear a vehicle struggling with the driveway. Just a couple of good old boys looking for a place to hunt. I tell them they can park down on the road and hunt the far side of the opposite ridge, that it merges into State Forest and there's a clear-cut where the deer feed in the evening. They promise me some meat if they score and we had a beer. The standard pick-up truck, here as in Mississippi, is equipped with a cooler and a case of beer, almost always Bud or Bud Light. When they leave I can't remember what I had been thinking about, roasted vegetables I think, or the principle of leverage. Later in the day Samara calls and talks about their holiday plans, their house this year, and how Scott was obsessive about preparation. He was actually cooking a practice turkey today, so everyone could go home with meat for sandwiches. We exchanged recipes for Brussels Sprouts, and gossiped a bit. Her Mom has separated from another husband, and the house Mark designed and built for them is on the market. It's an elegant small place, completely self-contained, a marvel, actually, heated by sunlight with these heat-transfer panels he builds himself. I'm not easily impressed (because I don't believe in anything) but this was an impressive house. On the other hand, I've given up three houses that I thought I would live in for the rest of my life, and I'm not dead yet. I've never been comfortable sleeping under a rock ledge, I always think the roof is going to fall. It's all self-conscious crap, the writer writing about a writer writing. The truth is, when I dry a fly with a couple of back-casts, then lay it in a ripple, I'm just pretending to be a bug. I know I'm imitating nature. My yellow stripes mean I'm poisonous, I have a spot on my ass that looks like an eyeball, no one messes with me after dark because they know they'd get shot, and that seems like a good balance.