Steel Grey

No wind, not much sound. Sitting out back, I could hear a squirrel. That dance across frosted leaves. The crows see me and start a racket, so I get them a couple of mice. Another mug of coffee and smoke on the back stoop. Damp, temperature right at freezing, very still, drifted into a middle space. My daughters are coming to visit next month, despite my pleas that they not. Rural Ohio is not a place to visit at the end of January. Every little plan can go awry. But Samara is alpha, and she had already bought the plane tickets because they were cheap. Throws me completely off my feed because I'm not set-up for major disruptions mid-winter. A can of beans and Thoreau's journals was what I had in mind, not entertaining anyone, much less my daughters. Plus the drain on the larder, not the expense, I don't care about that, but the actual inventory. I'm not actually prepared to feed other people. Nor entertain, even my daughters, because it's so difficult to just survive. D calls and he's on his way out with a load of butt rounds from the barrel-stave mill. He knew I was counting on him and I knew he'd come through. If he makes it up the driveway I'll be set for the winter. I was up all night reading about Dante's life and times. An incredible amount of speculation, as might be expected, but fascinating in regard to vernacular speech. Before he started writing Commedia he had written, in Latin, De Vulgari Eloquentia, in which he discusses the problems involved in arriving at a universal Italian. There were hundreds of dialects, some incomprehensible to the other. He'd been in exile for 13 years, wandering around the peninsula. D made it in, and we unloaded into a pile near the back door. Already split. Some surface moisture, but the house is so dry I'll just finish the chunks inside. I'll need to build a couple of crude bins, since the pieces won't stack, or just spread out a bunch on the floor near the stove. But this is truly the mother-lode for my winter. I still have seven large rounds, very dry, to split from last year, and a nominal pile of branch-wood that is very good for fast hot fires, but these are the chunks to get me through the night. I can pay Rodney or Ryan to stop by and carry in a week's supply, spread them out, and all I have to do is stoke the fire. About all I'm good for anymore. Dante died in 1321, he'd finished the last of the poem, though there's a bunch of mystical crap about the last 13 cantos. There was a daughter, Antonia, who died as Sister Beatrice in a convent. Galileo's daughter also died in a convent. An indicator of the times. A strong son is as good as an ox, a woman less so, unless she be a weaver; and dinner, of course, mammoth tongue and wild greens, or a great meal of small birds where you eat everything but the feet and the beak.