Ironing Time

Very good tomatoes at the farmer's market and I picked day-lily buds on the way home. Books, whiskey, and clean clothes. I was making half a dozen mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat when Maria arrived and she was almost immediately thumbing through books I had out. She asked, from across the room, if I spoke Anglo-Saxon, only a few words, I told her, I'm stronger in Middle English. I'd pounded out some slices of tenderloin, and made a gravy from the marinade, and when I was frying the day lily buds, she came up behind me and asked what I was doing. Dinner, I said. We ate, and talked for hours, her upbringing and mine. After a couple of hours I didn't find her interesting anymore, way too Republican and conservative. It's scary that she actually thought Trump made sense. I'd rather be alone than argue about immigration. Even hotter today Heat Index at 110, thunder all around. Enough wind to flip the leaves inside-out and rain in the afternoon. Enough crab-meat leftover to make a mushroom/crab mixture to have on toast. I added a little clam juice and sprinkled on a bit of flour, to bind things, and it was delicious, served with a slightly bitter salad and sliced tomato slathered with a rich avocado dressing. The mingled juices, mopped-up with a piece of crust, were particularly good. I watched a spider take a wasp in its web today. My soap opera is that wasps have made a nest in the overlapping sashes above the AC unit and a large spider (I don't my spiders) had spun a dense and quite ugly web below them. An odd feature of the web is that there's an almost perfect circular hole that runs through it. This is for those incredibly fast killing runs a spider makes. Most of the time, more than even a cat, a spider just stays perfectly still. The wasps know about the spider, and they are very good at getting free from filaments of web: beating their wings like a humming bird. But the spider knows when one is truly trapped, zips out and wraps it up. I watched a sequence today that went on for several hours. I don't understand why a spider doesn't stick to its own web but I'm sure it's related to those insects that skip along on top of water, somehow there's a layer of separation. Also the speed with which a spider can go from total repose to full action. Amazing. This is where eight legs come into play. I'd set up a viewing spot that allowed me to watch, a music stand holding whatever book I was reading held in place with a carpenter clamp, situated so that wasp/spider thing was happening just above the book, so I could look up frequently. It seemed like a break-through in communication. The big difference now is that I don't care. I do think that they thought I might have been a terrorist, I can't imagine why, or that I might steal tractors. I'm a low-level library guy, trying to get together $26 to buy a Finnish dictionary, I don't have time for world events. Word events, I have to say, I'd studied those triangular plots of ground, where roads meet, and I liked calling them a gore or a gusset, then this Norfolk use, calling it an 'ironed piece', a quilting phrase. and I don't understand why these particular pieces of real estate are always talked about in terms of sewing. An "ironing piece".