Service Restored

Sometime after six in the afternoon, the half-ring bleep, and the land-line was back. I didn't even read back over what I'd been writing. Overcast all day, with intermittent rain; but it's nice, in a somber way. In a lull, I walk out the driveway and spend an hour walking just a few hundred yards. Growth happening everywhere, quite astounding actually. I have to look at things, slice some of them open and taste them. And I always study the tracks. New mud, so there are a lot of tracks. Needed a fair amount of supplies, because of the late season snowstorm, so I went to town; some frost damage on the way, but it's still lovely. It was exciting to get out, especially as the phone had been dead, talk to Loren and Cory at the pub, eat a burger and have a milkshake on the way home, drive up the creek. D calls and we talk about early cameras for a while, then about vegetables. I'd stopped at B's on the way home, and he already has lettuce, radishes, and peas up out of the ground. The serious gardeners have all plowed and harrowed their patches. After all the years of gardening and farming I love watching other people's gardens grow. And I love going to the farmer's market, buying the fruit of other's labor. B and I talked about books for an hour, and I left piled high with London Reviews, a book on the battle of Trafalgar, and there was a New Yorker in the mailbox. I'd thoughtfully picked up a large slice of feta pizza at the Italian place, knowing I would sit down immediately and (as B says) 'high-grade' the articles I wanted to read first. So much new material that I can't scan it all at a first sitting, a week's reading, minimum, but I settled on a long piece about castrati, because I'd recently heard a recording of the last one, 1922, and I had been struck with the difference between a counter-tenor and a castrato. Also, Neil, when he was director of the National Book Awards, send me a lot of books, and one of them, I remember, was about the last of the castrati, who may have been the guy I heard, so I was interested. Gender politics, as a rule, don't interest me, I just don't care, if you present yourself as female, because of my English language, I would refer to you as she, or her. I have to heat some water to do some dishes, and it's warm enough to wash my hair and sponge off; so I decide to vacuum first, because I know I'll get dusty, while heating the water. Multi-tasking. Keep the thread. Which is difficult to do, or not, distracted by the natural world. The morels, for instance, I hope they view this as a threat, and pump out a good round of spores. I spread them, wherever I think they'd like to be. B and I talked about this, the way there could be several takes on any given incident. This book Nelson's Trafalgar is quite good. Technical and graphic detail. There were so many eye-witness reports that there's a chronological spreadsheet for the battle itself. Started about noon, when Nelson cut the enemy line, he gets shot about one-fifteen, the battle is over by two-thirty and mopped up by five. It's complex, but there are charts that locate space and time. It's quite exciting, as I suppose watching a sporting event or a movie might be, watching television, or shooting road-signs. I did vacuum for a while, but I came back to the book almost immediately, to immerse myself in the story. Sixty-one ships involved, the British badly out numbered, but Nelson's strategy, because of the wind, was brilliant. Several of the largest enemy ships just could not beat back into battle after they were cut out of line. And the British had improved the actual firing of cannon, the timing, by using a spark, a flint spark, to ignite the priming. With the rolling waves timing is critical, and the British were better gunners. I love this stuff. On ships of war, the gun-decks were painted red.