Extremely Clear

An owl left over from the night, head on a swivel. A lovely small thing, probably a barn owl, but I don't know owls as well as I should. The feathers around the face are perfect. Make a cup of coffee and toasted a couple of left-over biscuits (butter and marmalade), take them over to my desk, and the owl is still there. She (I'm assuming) bates, flairs her wings, a spectacular sight, eventually flies away when I'm not looking. Even watching as close as I can, I miss a lot. First there is a world, then there's not. Read a long essay by Tom Wolfe on the rise and fall of Chomsky, started a book on Dante, but then turned to the library book B had loaned because it had an actual due date. Back to the Anglo-Saxon, my recreation of choice right now. Sitting out back, I was struck again with the volume of leaves. Even around the Jeep, which is not under any trees, the layer is several inches thick. The angle of repose for dry leaves is practically zero. A carpet of leaves. The library book is Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood's retelling of The Tempest, in the Hogarth Press series of retellings of Shakespeare. Several bags of groceries, canned and dried goods, that I need to put into the rotation, so I spend some time looking at expiration dates. Discovered a great crab fried-rice recipe: you cook the crab-meat (one of those small cans of shredded meat) in the omelet and slice it into the rice. With some minced sweet onion this is excellent. A dash of clam juice, a dash of hot sauce. I spend about eight hours with the Atwood and the Yale Shakespeare Tempest, with at least another session to go. I like the Yale edition because it's easily readable, but it's huge and heavy. Mid-afternoon, I looked up and it was a beautiful day, falling leaves, pooling light as the canopy opens, so I walked down to the head of the driveway and stared across the hollow. Walking back to the house, thinking about how good the left-over fried rice was going to be, how wonderful the after dinner nip and smoke, I was grinning the whole way.