High Water

I didn't know it had rained so much, but the bottoms near town were flooded. The heirs of Boone Coleman will be paid this year to not raise soybeans. A quick beer and a very quick trip to Kroger and got back home just as the rain started again. Red beans and rice for an early dinner, with hushpuppies, then read Thoreau for a couple of hours while rain pattered on the roof. I'm quite dirty, as I've been cleaning, and I look forward to a full bath on the deck in the sheep-watering trough, but I put it off for another day, because I'm just going to get dirty again. I'm trying to get rid of some paper, New Yorkers, London Reviews, New York Reviews, tie them into bundles, for the recycling bin and try to take two into town every time I make the trip. In just a couple of months I should be able to double the usable space in my house. In many ways I don't pay any attention to what's happening off the ridge. That other world. May 9 Mackletree closes down so they can build a new bridge over Turkey Creek at the spillway. A big job, months, millions of dollars, and an enormous pain in the ass for everyone to drive around. I can get out Saturday and lay in supplies but visitors (two in June for me) will be hard-pressed to find the back way in. What was formerly remote becomes very difficult. Thank god I don't have to commute to work. I will go down and watch them build the bridge, construction is always interesting, and I have an abiding interest in spanning gaps. An obsession of mine forever, a simple truss, or some complicated combination of king-posts and queen-posts. Reading Thoreau, just before and when he was living in the cabin, his writing style changes. He starts to notice things. The writing style becomes natural. The posturing falls away. He walks a lot in the rain, and I wonder what he wears. A slicker and a rain-hat? Nothing at all, probably. I keep a lush towel for drying off, when I come in, and a change of clothes, start a small fire of junk mail, just to dry out the house, a wee dram to clean out the sinus, roll a smoke with a nominal gram of tobacco. Two fingers and a thumb. Reading about Benoit Mandelbrot. Fractals. Interesting that the entire development started with a paper he read (or heard) on word frequency. I have a word frequency index, a study for a dictionary, and I often pull it out to see where a word falls. Harvey, bless his departed soul, made a poem out of the first fifty words, in order. It involved an amazing display of punctuation and line breaks. We printed it as a broadside but I don't seem to have a copy. It was quite funny. Another day of rain with a break of a couple of hours. Wandered outside, because it had gotten so still. Not a bug, not a bird, no wind, everything about as wet as it good get; extremely overcast, with a low ceiling. The rain (condensing drops of water, not quite rain yet) were forming at about the height of my chest. Right there in front of me. Watching rain starting to fall. Hiking in Colorado you could sometimes walk down into a rain shower. Many times I've walked down into a fog, but I was watching rain happen, and it felt slightly magic. Filed the thought away, or lost it, the magic part, at least. Gathered enough morels to make an excellent gravy for a small steak. Shad and the dog-wood are blooming, and it's lovely to see them, untended, in deep woods. What was I thinking?