There You Go

I heard Rodney's truck on the driveway. I don't want him to drop by, long periods of time I don't want any interruption, I've based my life on not being interrupted. He doesn't seem to understand that I want to be left alone. He thinks his saga is worth at least a shot of whiskey, then he goes almost out of control. I feel like I'm in a Sean O' Casey play. After some probing, I realize he doesn't have a clue. Kim is worried about two of his brothers that don't have outside interests, and I think that's true about a great many people. It seems that social contact has become a hobby for most. It's difficult for me to grasp. I barely have time to talk to myself. After a walk, before I started writing, I made a nice parsnip dish, bar-boiled, then sliced and fried, served on a bed of leaf-lettuce with balsamic, some goat cheese and pine nuts. Some slices of tart apple would have been good. Later, I went back and swiped the plate clean with a piece of bread. The good stuff. When I was driving over to Iowa frequently, I favored a back road that took me across the Mississippi at Burlington, Iowa. A lovely cabled modern bridge running right into an old river town, no reason to stop but a place that sold Chicago Dogs that were the best I ever had, so I always stopped there. Two picnic tables that looked out on a field of corn, sweet tea, and a dramatically over-stuffed bun. One of those 'borrow ponds', where they'd taken earth to build an overpass, a several acre pond where people caught fish and ate picnic lunches. Hadn't been to town for a week, and hosting a guest, I was low on some supplies. Made a list and headed out. Slow drive, windows down; didn't pass a vehicle on Lower Twin, and I know every turn-out on 125, so I can pull over and let someone pass, and each of the turn-outs is different, a different direction, almost completely different flora, a couple of the them were minor quarries. Peel off the top soil, around here, and you quickly get to sandstone. The stratified deposits are two and three feet thick and are easily worked into foundation stones. A favored size, locally, was about two feet wide, three feet long, two feet high. Twelve cubic feet, would weigh 1688 pounds. I could easily get this done today, Boobie, with a strap on the bucket of his backhoe, but how did they do it in 1900, with a wagon and two horses? I'm thinking about that all the way into town, because there are so many examples of the sandstone being used that way. They had a system. Half of one of the massive burgers at the pub for lunch, the other half brought home for dinner, and I stocked the cub-board, not to be caught off-guard. When I get home, driving the other way around, I feel an enormous sense of relief. Drinking water, juice, fresh fruits and vegetables. Because I do just crawl into a hole: noodles, hot sauce and thou. But I need a supply line, a connection. I did move Wellfleet oysters into East Dennis, they took there.