Quiet Dark

A week of fine weather in the forecast. Eighty high, sixty low. Three in the morning, mustering the consciousness necessary to go outside and pee. Put on my slippers, drape a blanket across my shoulders; a full moon behind overcast, but light enough to see. It's so still I can almost hear the air, I can feel the pull of gravity, climbing the three steps back into the house. Locker-room talk. Spare us all. I've never heard that kind of shit before. In my early days in theater, gay men ran the business (they all died of AIDS) and they might nudge one another and call attention to a waiter's ass, but bragging about assaulting women is beyond the pale. Yet the needle does not waver. Trump has 42% of the vote. They don't seem to care what he says. The consummate asswipe. It's difficult for me to understand how anyone believes his bullshit. I take another aimless walk and stumble on an acorn midden, sure sign of a red squirrel, realize I haven't seen a red squirrel in years. I walked over to the wild rhododendron patch and all of the leaves I'd tagged were still attached. I wonder about holly, that same kind of leaf, and decide to tag some of them. Next spring I want to tag some of the leaves when they first emerge. Beech leaves stay attached for a long time. If you walk in the woods in winter, everything stripped bare, the beeches are holding last year's leaves. The old leaves are pushed off, by new growth in the spring; many beeches, it's fair to say, lose their leaves in the spring. Beech is a climax tree, late-growth forest. I had a lovely grove of them in Mississippi, and it was almost impossible to access, which is why it existed. Beech is beautiful wood, light and figured, but its growth pattern makes it a lousy timber tree, one saw log at the base of the trunk. Basho:

With millet and grass
not a thing wanting:
grass-thatched hut