Yellow Orange

Intense color, and I still can't see the other side of the hollow. A hickory tree on the driveway dropped all of its leaves at once, all the same color. Quite a pile, maybe six inches deep, and I couldn't see the driveway. I'd walked down, looking on the exposed bank for ginseng. I didn't want the roots, I have plenty, but I was harvesting seeds. For a dibble I was using a screwdriver, and I'd plant the seeds nearby. The pale yellow poplar leaves are a filter for the sunlight. I gathered a few chicory roots. End of the season tomatoes, I bought some sliced roast beef, so I could make some end-of-the-season sandwiches with blue cheese and hot sauce; with some sweet potato chips, fried in peanut oil. This is so good I want to give out awards. Cleaned the stovepipe, then cleaned up from cleaning the stovepipe, then cleaned myself, and that took most of the day. Reading William Least Heat-Moon, Roads To Quoz, and I'd been over some of the same roads, eaten at some of the same fish-shacks; but I don't want to travel anymore, I just want to stay at home, sit on the back porch with a wee nip and roll a smoke. What was that stuff, not iodine (though it was used also), mercurochrome? that turned your skin orange. The maples are that color now, almost transparent, like an aniline dye. Fucking raccoons got into the pail of compost I'd put outside, to add to stove-ash on the pile tomorrow, and made a mess. I have to clean it up, because it stinks. Jude asked me why I composted at all, since I didn't grow anything, but you have to do something with your waste. The Space Station, for instance, or a submarine. The Poop Deck. Poop is a silly word, but we need various names for things, and 'poop' takes the smell off shit. If you raise kids, you end up using the word. I occasionally say "oh poop" when something doesn't work correctly. I like the cartoon aspect of it, the balloon that appears over a character's head just before his skiff goes over the waterfall. There's a wonderful smokey red in the under story, the sumac, and the poison ivy is beautiful. I try to store color, in the larder, because winter is so black and white. There's a small blue flower, I have no idea what it is, growing in disturbed ground. My first thought is that the seed must be very light, almost weightless. You can draw a straight line between any two points.