Expressing Anger

Long silences. When I clear my throat it sounds very loud, and I feel like some animal other than human. It's still and quiet after the rain. I open up the house and take a mug of coffee out back, sit on the stoop. The dust is washed away and the last colors of fall sparkle in the morning light. I drift into the middle-distance, where vision blurs. Remembering the past is tricky business. Surprisingly, last time I was with my sister and we were talking about the past, we agreed on many particulars: date, location, the people present, even the general atmosphere. I was shocked that I hadn't made it all up, I was pretty sure that I had, and then my sister, who is steadfast and honest, tells me that something did actually happen. A specific thing, she did step on a moccasin and it only didn't bite her because it had a frog in its mouth. She and my cousin Jackie did humiliate me in every way possible, but it was fun mostly, except for the incident with the frying pan. T H White's The Goshawk in the mail from Jude, and a pair of hand-knit mittens. Mittens are good for reading on a cold night, you slip one off every three minutes (on average, over many years, it takes me three minutes to read a page, it varies wildly, but three minutes is the average) and turn the page. Feeling a bit out of sorts, which usually means I need to eat something. I'd picked up my oysters at Kroger, and a couple of remaindered portibello mushrooms, started a fire in the grill, roasted the mushrooms, roasted the oysters and ate them all with salsa. I've fixed variations of this meal in many places because it's so fast and quite tasty. Just before I left the west, I'd gone up into the mountains, the Little Cimarrons, to catch a last meal of Cutthroat trout, and I'd taken oysters and mushrooms. Set up camp, an oil-skin tarp to sleep under, a ring of river stones for a fire, and a refrigerator rack for a grill. Refrigerator racks are very useful, if you plaster them inside and out they're excellent reinforcement. I had a great bamboo fly-rod then, I don't know what happened to it in the move back east, short and pliable, I could use it in tight situations. I'm not even a "good" flyfisherperson, but I can always catch dinner. These small trout, you just grill them, then open them up and remove the bones in a single deft move, then eat all the rest. I can't understand English, it's so colloquial. I'm left with a language of signs. Burma Shave.