Soodle

To walk in a leisurely manner (John Clare), to saunter. Three deer outside my window, nosing through the ferns, sleek and lovely. Reading Gerard Hopkins, a writer very much in touch with the natural world. His name keeps popping up in researching landscape terms. He made up a great many of them: goldfoil (a kind of lightning), boarlight (the burnished quality of light at the end of a beautifully clear day, bright-borough (a night sky filled with stars), and they're so specific, especially about the nature of light. I need to read a biography of him. Forgot to eat, setting up Little Dell, so I made a pot of rice and had a bowl with soy sauce and chopped peppers, then spent some time writing, learning the ins-and-outs of the undated AOL service. I can't get over how quiet Little Dell is, she sounds, as we used to say about our Servel gas refrigerator, like a puppy sleeping. I hadn't realized how loud Black Dell had gotten at the end, but I had written 5,000 pages on her, five modems, two keyboards, and hundreds of brown and black outages. At the finish she was suffering shortness of breath and bad circulation. I held her hand until the very end, writing an eulogy I knew I could never send. I'm capable of emotional dross, anything to mitigate the erosion of memory. Joel called, wondering if I'd died, no, I told him, but the poplars are turning yellow on the ridge. And it's true, every time I go to town now, I add food for the larder, a couple of cans of hash, a few cans of beans; the Kroger brand of vegetables are two for a dollar, so I buy some butter beans and some turnip greens. I haven't been able to find dried eggs, which would turn hoecake into cornbread (in my extensive research, it's the addition of egg, and cooking in the oven, that makes a hoecake cornbread), but I can usually keep eggs through the winter;I also have powdered milk and bacon bits, that allow for a superior Mac-and-Cheese, if you're camping way off the beaten track. Sway is the word that designates animal tracks that deviate from a straight line, perfectly descriptive, Manx or Gaelic, and I think of my fox. When I follow her trail, I'm amazed and always interested in why she veered off the path. She also eats oak galls. B calls and I talk his ear off because I'm so excited by this rookie, Little Dell; she shows great promise, as a helpmeet for my dotage. He needs a ride to town and I'm certainly available, I tell him to call and remind me, because I don't keep track of time, but that I already had another list of things I needed, and a trip to town would be fine. Cory is holding a beer in abeyance, an oatmeal stout, and I want to connect.