Midnight Scramble

The rain tapers off and the entire soundscape is composed of drips. Over the course of the last few days I'd fried a pound of bacon and the house smelled great. I tend toward reading myself into a coma, and I had taken a nap. When I woke up to pee I decided I was hungry and I knew there was a skillet with bacon fat, so I nuked a potato, a baker, then fried three slices. When they were nearly done, I cut them into cubes, right in the skillet and finished them with a pat of butter and black pepper. Top these with a fried egg, a piece of toast, thick with bitter marmalade. I was thinking about how bitter is an acquired taste, when chaos erupted at the compost heap. I was sure I heard the bobcat, a single dog, a beagle probably, and something else, a raccoon. Turning on a light doesn't interrupt a young war. Red eyes burning in the night. I just want them to go away, so I can go back to sleep, so I throw out a firecracker. Black Cat firecrackers clear the playing field. Of course I can't go back to sleep, so I stayed up most of the rest of the morning reading a guide for Field Amputation (Civil War to WWI), gruesome stuff, but interesting. After Bull Run and Gettysburg the field Docs were doing a hundred amputations a day. A team with a system, seven guys, six holders and a surgeon. The time for a field amputation was measured in seconds. Cauterize the wound with hot tar or an iron plate heated red-hot. At some point I switch over to coffee, fry potato slices in bacon fat, fry a perfect egg, and I see the light gathering in the east. I knew it was supposed to get hot, so I took an early morning walk. The bugs are bad in the hollows, so I walked the ridge tops, west. The rattlesnakes were taking advantage of the heat to move down slope, they seem to migrate about half-a-mile, to the bottoms. There was a female today (thinner and longer) that stretched almost all the way across the driveway. I carry a mop handle to which I've affixed a broken "V" from a dead Chevrolet. It's a very good attachment. I put a saw kerf in the end of the handle, wedged in the V up to the crotch, so that I was able to wrap it tightly around the shaft and through the crotch. Wet rawhide. Nice lashing, though Kim, a lasher of note, would have probably wrapped in a Double Round Overlap or some damned thing. I have a ferrule on the handle end, to use it as a walking stick. Neptune, with a horribly amputated trident. It's the Spreading Decline, I swear. Late spring and then again in the fall it's my walking stick of choice. In winter I use cross-country ski poles. In the early spring I use a mop handle with a narrow paint scraper secured in the end, that I use to flip away shit, to look and see whether or not I want to squat down. I'm more judicious with my squats now but not much has changed.. I love the change in smell, from fecund to seductive, and I love the way everything sounds different, and I love the way I can go to sleep, secure in the knowledge that I'll probably wake up tomorrow.