Hawks

Used to seeing Red-Tailed hawks, but a very lovely Sparrow hawk today. Came in under the trees and settled on a branch about twenty-five feet away and proceeded to clean itself. I've watched them do this before. A forty minute video on personal bird hygiene. Makes my day. After it leaves I go outside because it's supposed to rain later, and resume my bud patrol. It's fascinating how quickly this is happening, not the oaks yet, and certainly not the walnuts (they're always last) but all sorts of things going on. The smell of rotting leaves is wonderful, having windows open, looking across the hollow and seeing a flush of color. Outside with just a tee-shirt, when, a month ago, I was wearing four or five layers. A few wasps inside and I always get stung a time or two, every spring. Moistened tobacco takes the sting out. Reading Charles Darwin on coral reefs. I need to get to the library, because I'm getting backed up on a few things, and I need some fiction. Distant thunder, and these afternoon storms are more of the season, hit or miss, short-lived. I'd like to get out tomorrow, mail my Visa bill, get some seafood, have a conversation. Which would involve cleaning up myself and washing my hair. I had to clean the foam filter on the Shop-Vac, a truly dusty operation, so I've managed to get fairly dirty, but I'm poised to begin cleaning. The house is the quite the mess, anyone, I think, coming in from the outside, would be appalled. I wrap up some New Yorkers and London Reviews, to take to the recycling center, and flatten some cans, to use as shingles on a pet house despite the fact that I don't have a pet, STILL, having a pet house shingled in flattened 303 cans seemed like a good idea, rain, dripping from the eaves. But does it actually signify? Later, I'm listening to some early blues, Son House and Robert Johnson. I would certainly sacrifice anything to be there, come into my kitchen. Rain on the roof, then I pick up some early Allman Brothers, Dwayne, Dicky Bets, and great percussion, one of the drummers off-beat, a great version of "Whipping Post". The signal fades, and I hear a train over in Kentucky, makes me want to go shoot some stop signs; not really, but I do turn off the light and smoke a cigaret in the dark. I can roll a cigaret (with just a flicker of light, to see which is the glued edge) in the dark, get a drink, go outside to pee. Deep black, completely overcast, a clear and present danger is knocking over a pile of books, and it starts raining hard, so I shut down. I lost part of a paragraph, a total sidetrack, about the Sargasso Sea, I was reading Maury, ocean currents, the Gulf Stream. There's a wild grape in Portugal, that looks like the flotation devices, sargo, or sarga, so that's what they called it, and suddenly I was in the dark, literally, it was so dark you couldn't see your hand. I have my headlamp at hand, and I get a wee dram and roll a smoke. But mostly I feel my way around. Phone is out, so I can't send. Up early, and I'm out the door quickly, driving down the creek. It's lovely, daffodils, actual green stuff on the creek banks, then fifteen miles along the Ohio. A glorious day, the sun comes out, and Kentucky, across the river, is beautiful. I stopped at almost every one of the places where I can safely pull off the road. QWenr to the library and discussed catachresis with the new librarian (Angie). Someone else had told her I was a writer, so I went out the Jeep and got her a copy of the "Cistern", and wrote down the blog site. She was wearing Tommy Girl perfume, lightly, and I told her it smelled good on her. She asked how on earth I could know that, and I told her it was actually quite distinctive, and that I had a blind friend who could identify everyone he knew by smell. Stopped at the pub. Nice conversations with the staff, Justin is almost disgustingly happy, stop at the bank, and our numbers balance, I have a little more money than I thought, because I hadn't been to town for weeks at a time and you do save money by not leaving home. Later, a few bucks burning a hole in my pocket, I was walking around the seafood case, and they had two pound bags of cleaned smelt. Decided the course of the evening for me. Hush Puppies, with smelt rolled in a spiced corn flour. I went back and bought a pint of cold-slaw, a very good Irish whiskey, and a smoked jowl. I was going to just cook everything in peanut oil, but it was so expensive, that I bought a smoked jowl, rendered out the fat, cooked the hush puppies and fish, filtered and saved the oil for cooking potatoes later, and had a batch of cracklings. It's a better deal. Everything is better cooked in pork fat. Smelt, I have to smile. I used to catch these by the bucket-full in Sesuit Harbor, head and gut them with a pair of scissors, and fry them by the dozen in an old cast-iron skillet on the grill. If you cooked them inside, the house smelled like fish for a week. They're as good as I remember, and the hush-puppies are fantastic, corn-meal, an egg, some rising, a minced onion, buttermilk. They had Mackletree closed again yesterday, road crews and truckloads of Asplunt tree guys. Finally getting some of the fire dead trees removed, and they (the tree guys) had knocked the phone line down in several places and the phone company wasn't going to repair until the tree guys were done. A cluster fuck. Don't know when I'll have a phone again. Way too many guys working, so I'm sure it's a state-funded project. I parked on the other side of the lake, on my way around, and watched them for a while; they were working at about a 50% level, stopping, chatting, a couple of them having a smoke. I don't blame them, I worked hard physically most of my life, and being paid full wage for 50% effort is a good deal. But it's also why everything costs so much. I've built houses (this one) for twenty dollars a square foot, and I've built houses for $150 a square foot (Telluride); but how it can possibly cost 13.5 million to add a 2,000 foot addition to a museum in Houston is beyond me. Even if everyone was making the maximum amount of money possible. That's $6,750 dollars a square foot for a building that is mostly empty space. The profit margin on this is amazing. It is expensive to build, you have to buy off so many people, and it does have to look nice, but greed is such an ugly thing. Women with fat asses should not wear tights. Geneva Conventions or something. And where do all those delegates stay, and what do they eat, and who pays for that? Room service, a bar, a sudden craving for nachos. The power goes out, the phone is still out, the weather is fine, just a bit of wind, so the outage usually means someone took out a telephone pole. Light rain yesterday and I was reminded of the time I spent living in a gunshot trailer on the Navajo reservation, building a house in Utah. I had a friend there, a very old man, and we'd sit in the shade, after work, discussing the old ways of doing things. He always referred to light drizzle as "female rain", a Navajo word that I never could say. I loved hearing the language, it was so completely alien; and their concept of time had a profound effect on me. I've never worn a watch, so I had a step up on not keeping track, except for the bench-marks: dawn, mid-day, and dark. When I was stage-managing, I did keep a pocket watch at my command post, because certain things were timed.

Tight green curls of fern
buds swelling with sap bursting
pollen in the air

The last of the smelt, with a final round of hush-puppies, and I feel like I should eat nothing but greens for a week, drink beet juice, and maybe spend a few hours in a sweat-lodge. Weevils had gotten into the corn flour, I just sifted them out, but I have to admit that I thought about adding them to the pork fried rice I was starting. Remaindered loin chops that I cube and marinate for 24 hours in a balsamic tinted wine and highly spiced liquid. I made the rice too, a saffron flavored Spanish rice I had read about somewhere, because fried rice is much better if the rice is left-over. I've been reading quite a lot, recently, about raising rice. About the whole concept of being 'married to the soil', which is pretty rigorous, if you get at all serious, you end up with a lot of frown lines, and miles of irrigation; I wasn't even thinking, humming a Grateful Dead cover of a Dylan song, trying to put together a list of things I needed to get in town. When it struck me that being out in the woods was so completely different from living any other way. You have a faucet, a thermostat, I have a five gallon bucket. On three.