Two Stories About WoodIn the backyard of the memory of my childhood, there are two giant, lofty silver maples, arms spread to the sky. In summer they blot the sun, in winter cast stern admonition to the clouds. They are handy for holding up the ends of a rope hammock, to swing gently in the dappled light that trips down through the shifting leaves.
The actual trees are gone, now. It is part of the nature of the silver maple to be fickle with health as it ages; the limbs rot from inside, betraying no sign, until a large piece of tree puts a hole in something. It was time for the trees to go, and the backyard of my memory is now only that.
The actual backyard now has the problem of being something of a communal drainage depression for the neighborhood. One of the features of trees is to absorb vast amounts of ground water and fling it into the sky; I know this to be true - in their absence, the trees have the last laugh. The backyard of my memory was never so swampy.
A while ago, Mr. Containment and I happened upon a discarded, seasoned limb of one of the local ginkgo trees, lightly weathered and stripped of leaf. Mr. Containment took some pleasure in this, for that was a piece of ginkgo wood that would never again foul his car with fruit. I took the limb home.
One of the over winter projects has been to pare down the limb into a walking stick. A whip saw took care of the small stubs, and a procession of sandpapers brought the wood down to a soft, powdery shine. It took three coats of linseed oil, and smells gently of older times.
At the head end of the stick, the trimmings left the rough shape of a face, better brought out by the darkening of the wood by the oil. It is off center and howling, mouth agape. It rages with eyes open, it sings loud songs.
Or not.
Runneth OverYet another mark of the modern age: don't let the filesystem fill up.
WashJuliet puts her hand to my face. "Stop," she says, "listen." We are quiet, and the voices filter up through the floor, Marco and Jacobo. "They're fighting."
They are moving around downstairs; they are pacing from room to room, feet falling heavy to gently shake the house. Their voices are murmurs and shouts, and someone pounds a table. Jacobo is in the hallway, shouts "homunculi!", and it slips across the banister to come upward towards us.
Marco is at the foot of the stairs too, now, and his voice climbs the stairs easily:
"It is not I that make them. They themselves make them!"
The Terrible ChewingThere are marks on my finger; I do not recognize them, nor remember how they got there. This is not surprising, or even rare; there are a number of sharp edges in my daily fumblings. The walkways of my home have myriad of things to stumble against. Digging around in the guts of machines usually yields blood. My kitchen is rife with them. On small scales, I live a dangerous life for fingers.
Seen from an alternate angle, they look like bite marks, a little. There is little in my life to cause such things. Would I consider it, I would think that the things that bite could be in no other place than the closet. I speak of the closet we all have, the deep one, the one where things get pushed ever further back, a compression of history of things past in dusty boxes slightly smashed from the terrible weight.
I have a stout flashlight, and a good hat; I shall go hunting.
Back to GroundIt turns out that in the back of my closet, deep in the back of it, there is open air, clean skies, and winter. A proper winter, mind, deeply cold and dry, the air crackling and clear to let in the starlight. It is very unlike the urban environment of my closet: there is a lovely quiet to it all, and the soft voices of the trees carry.
Next time, I will not lick the lamp-post.
Astronomical MattersI had penchant to travel east.
The most interesting thing about this (as it were) is the day it I did it. I went east on the solstice, and when I stopped 400 miles later, I had somewhat shortened the about of my day.
The manner of conveyance doesn't really matter; I could have made the day's worth of trip on a horse (I'd considered it). I am fully confident that there is someone, somewhere, who went further eastward (in the northern hemisphere) than me that day, and that their daylight was shorter still, stretching the solstice unnatural.
I got it back upon return. And in six months, perhaps I will take a horse westward.
Il Vento Ha Denti, OggiWhen the wind is hungry in the sky: when the pine tree sings with it, and the leaves clatter, and the pane trembles. I must admit I enjoy it when nature comes knocking.
Couch + Afghan = Nap...an odd combination of pirate-themed early music and then on to Steelers trivia traded in a nearly empty dining room betwixt two very rocking brass rails, the odd throb of 80's music somewhere in the background, and then towels to wave for the short walk home.
Excellent.
Because They Might Get ColdThere was an 80's festival at work this evening, after hours; all manner of things from past days seen strangely though the lenses of nostalgia and inexperience. There was an amateur acapella group, belting out the hits, wearing leg warmers. There was a jazzercise exposition, with leg warmers. There were blowpops to be had and a respectable game of four-square in play. In one room: arcade games. Old guard stand-up consoles: Centipede, Galaga, Ms. Pacman, Dig Dug, all set to free play. I played enough Robotron 2084 to see the edges of the Zone, but really had no strong pull to reconquer that space. To further the art of it all, I kept putting quarters on the bezels, but they kept disappearing.
(I have a television again, for the Steelers games. It is a mark of the age that we live in that I mentioned this at work. This broke free a mass of conversation about which I really could help with, because I only get four channels, and two of them badly. I told them this: they wanted to know what was wrong with my cable. "I get the signals out of the air," I said. Blank looks followed: "you can still do that?")
It turned out what was happening to the quarters was this: folks were picking them up off the bezel and putting them in the machines.
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