Nothing Fancy

Miles playing sparely, then Wayne Shorter, then Bill Evans. Sitting in the dark, listening. Like a tonic. A nap and then a quick trip to town, is what I'm thinking, because I can, the first rule of winter on the ridge, even though I don't actually need anything. I bought some more of the breakfast burritos and a couple of hard avocados. I stopped by the place I'm dumped the pig scraps and there was nothing there, nothing, every blood-soaked leaf had been eaten. I went out the long way around, to clean the undercarriage of the jeep at the ford, and enjoyed the ride enormously. Stopped at the lush stand of bamboo on 52, next to a old tobacco barn, the side of which is painted with an ad for a store in town that closed 15 years ago. I stopped at the place where they cleared the overburden, down to sandstone, to prevent mud-slides. I find a great many fossils there. Roller-coaster weather, 50 degrees today, 55 tomorrow, rain, big winds, then dropping temps and snow. The wind starts high in the trees, then sweeps across the ridge. The stick trees are groaning. It's grand. Get out a couple of candles and put the headlamp at the end of my desk, switch off the computer. Warm enough to take a sponge bath. About four in the morning the rain comes in hard, darker than a coal mine, branches scraping against each other, thunder, a howling that moans through the hollows. Can't see a damned thing, but it's quite the auditory experience. Storm produces storm-memories. Run out of the high country by a snow storm in August, riding out hurricanes in Florida, tornadoes in Mississippi, a huge storm on Cape Cod, when I dropped acid and went down to the beach. These explosions of nature are always a rap on the knuckles. Making sure you're awake. The trip into town today, I recycled everything I could, but I still have bags of trash to deal with. I dug a fire-pit and provided a cool air-intact channel, a forge, actually, and covered it with a grill, a cast iron grate, so the fly ash wouldn't set the woods on fire.