The Right Choice

I've seldom been trapped for more than a day or two. Once in Utah, once in Nevada, once on the Upper Cimarron in Colorado, and they all ended up being funny stories in which you made tea from muddy water. More rain, for several days, and the wall of green encloses. It's so beautiful, in hundreds of shades, I'm in thrall. I love winter, the contrast, the black-and-whiteness of it, the isolation, but I also love the greening of the hollows, the blackberries blooming, the trillium at the bottom of the driveway, the redbud and shad bush. The blackberries are amazing, they bloom, they set fruit, the yield depends on water, and right now it looks like a bumper crop. The snakes are another story, I've never seen so many. Next month, when the ridge-top finally dries, they'll move down to the hollows, but when I went to go to town earlier this week, there were two rattlesnakes between me and the Jeep. It was cool, mid-morning, and they were stretched out, soaking in sunlight. They can't hurt you at this point, they can lunge a few inches, but they have to be coiled to make a strike. Good timing, because one of them is a pregnant female, so I put them in a bucket and relocated them down in the State Forest. B drove up the hill, with a copy of his new collected poems, Occasional Cleavage, and we talked for a while. Of course he would like to have designed the book himself. He's a book designer (wearing several hats) and he likes ten point type. Doesn't mean he's not a nice person. Private jokes. I use more space, I like eleven point type on a twelve point slug, even though, when I'm writing, I enjoy the compression. I write in ten-point type. Compress everything as much as possible.