Spring Light

Broken light through clouds. The woods are awash in pools of intense brightness. I spent several hours just walking around, being surprised. I thought I wanted to read some fiction, but I fairly quickly retreated to an article, a long piece actually, about bear behavior. Turned on the radio, to listen to Science Friday, one of my favorite shows, ate some morels and baked beans on toast. Thought about how lucky I've been. To be where I am now, this wind-blown ridge, surrounded by books, free to walk about. It's a great release to not have to engage the social world. To just be able to stop and look around. I have to go town tomorrow, the last day before they close the road, stock up on a few things, and the library called, a book for me. I can mail my bills for the month, pick up a small steak, another avocado for the rotation, and not have to go to town for a couple of weeks. This driving around crap is a pain the ass. Months of it, at least a year. Either other way I go, the terrain is changed. I can't go fifty feet from the bottom of my driveway before most of the flora is different. A little late getting started, but I did get to town. There was a huge bicycle event, 1100 people biking down from Columbus, eating a pasta meal, then biking back, TR had called, to warn me, but it wasn't so bad, and the pub was open. By the time I'd had a beer and watched sports' highlights everyone was gone. The book at the library was the new John Sandford novel. I picked up a couple of pot pies, threaded my way through bikers, and beat it on home. Spent the rest of the day and night reading, soft rain, lovely coolness. When I'm reading my own work, in public or to myself, I read a page (30-42 lines, single spaced) in about three minutes; when I'm reading fiction, which is line spaced for readability, I read a page in about a minute (0.9). It takes me 6.66 hours to read the Sandford, actually it takes eight hours because I spend 1.3 hours eating pot pies and staring into space. I'm more careful drinking and reading, now that spewing coffee on the edge of a book cost me three dollars at the library. It's good to know these things can be quantified. Thoreau gets so much better, after Walden, when he slows down a bit on the proselytizing, and talks more about what he specifically sees. And how, when he doesn't know what something is, he finds out. I was cleaning out an old bottle, I use bee-bees for this, because they're cheap and reusable. Or is it just b-bs, or bi-bis, or be-bes; those little copper-colored pellets, though I suspect they're no longer copper, that are actually quite uniform. I believe they could be key to my system of weights and measures. All I had been trying to do was to determine what quantity of dried mushrooms were required for a certain dish, I wasn't trying to determine the weight per acre of pollen in May, but if you had a pint jar of completely dried morels, how many meals was that? Two meals, as it turns out, two meals and two additional meals of leftovers. By my calculations I need to dry 13 pounds of morels in the next six weeks, and I seriously doubt I can do that. For some reason I started thinking about prime numbers, a familiar theme for me. I know very little math, but I play with numbers all the time. When I last went to the courthouse, to file my tree-farm for a tax break, I'd stopped to sit on a stone bench. Knowing that sandstone weighs 140 pounds a cubic foot I calculated that the bench seat I was sitting on weighed 420 pounds. No wonder it wasn't attached. Most of the stone blocks, two feet thick, that make up the courthouse, weight about 1250 pounds, can't have been easy, to mortar and set those in place. And it's an odd unit of measurement, 18 inches by 24 inches by 36 inches, but maybe that's the unit they could handle. The quarry, at Lower Twin, was downhill all the way to the river, the only real problem was stopping the rock at the bottom. I like to take a couple of wraps around a hard-wood tree and set back on my heels. Never wrap the rope around your wrist. Or your waist, for that matter. Cut in half by a shroud, listen, 500 ropes, under tension, you lose a few; the French tended to shoot for the rigging. At the waterline, most of these ships are 22 inches thick, Florida Live Oak, but it still splinters after a 32 pound shot. Haul a prize into any neutral port, accept the current value. Two owls, how cool is that?