Twisted Trees

Sassafras is very flexible when it's young, it's not unusual to find them twisted around another tree. Cold night (first frost on the ridge) and the routine is to start a fire, get it damped down, and either take a walk or split kindling while the house warms. These woods are vast, and it's quite easy to find new places. I was in a thick stand of sassafras this morning and I found one that was a complete corkscrew, five full twists around a poplar. I might harvest it later, for one reason or another, or I might not. It would be cool to have it in the house, just leaning in the corner or turned into a lamp, on the other hand it would make an interesting tree. I'll probably leave it. I was going to go to town, library and laundromat, but I blew it off, stayed in the woods for several hours, mostly because I had gotten slightly lost; and I was starved. When I got home, and re-stoked the fire, I heated tomato soup and made a grilled cheese sandwich, and then I just wanted to read, sit still. I called TR at the museum, and told him I wouldn't be in town, but that I thought he'd want to know I'd gotten slightly lost. When I remembered it was hunting season I cut out to the NW where I knew there was a road. The area I wander around in is only a few square miles. Booby's son Michael had gotten his first deer and it was hanging in the shade down at their stable. They have a tractor with a bucket, and the carcass was suspended from the bucket, lifted above the dogs. I had a great gambrel in Mississippi, the pulley rigged for getting hay into the hayloft. Perfect weather for hanging a deer, nights just below freezing and days in the fifties. Fog rises up the hollow. It's lovely, that whole ethereal vibe. Unlike on the coast, where fog rolls in, here, the hollow fills and the fog rises. Some saturated days, I've watched fog meet low clouds and the rain starts at about my chest. I do get the laundry together, including a couple of winter things that have never been washed: a very thick sweatshirt from Iowa, and a fleece-lined heavy denim shirt that I wear all the time when I'm inside. Also the somewhat thinner sweatshirt that I wear under the thicker sweatshirt. Might as well start out clean. The smell of fresh laundry is a boon. Hot ironed sheets, perfect rolled collars, those very large towels, usually I avoid that stuff, I'd rather sleep on the sofa, and be gone before you got up. I don't want to be any trouble. Clean laundry is a wonderful thing, the smell, and warmth from the dryer, it's hard to resist a Grateful Dead tee-shirt heated thus, or a pair of warm socks.