Cold water, one dollar
Crows calling in the
cemetery
Book about water
Mud underfoot Ferns
growing out of the walls
Cackles, protestations
Free tours
Vaults, sarcophagi
biers Hide and seek
among gravestones
Marble, cement
etched names
A spigot, dry for years
This land, this district...
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"Have you caught any of the latest virals?"
"I got the flu shot."
"What?"
"I don't know what you're saying."
"I was asking you a question..."
There is a heron working the creek, a big blue bird with slow wing-beats. I've never seen one here before. The Little Tavern was flowing strong, its overflow channel along the road deep as I've ever driven through.
I've got radio going in the house...
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I'm tired and restless. This was that soft-life nightmare-scenario year where both stocks and bonds declined in value. Who was going to see that coming?
It's like how we usually get invited by our friend to add music to a "Best of Year" playlist, which goes on queue at her year-end New Year's Eve bash. Except this year, nothing, no mention of it. She's got the entire musical landscape covered?
Dateline Farm, woodsmoke hands, Miles on a Bluetooth speaker.
It's a riff from the Jack Johnson Sessions. It's not one of the better songs on the album but it's not the worst music I've heard today.
That 'reward' goes to the songs I heard coming across 'Orscheln Radio' whilst I searched for all and sundry at the Orscheln Farm and Home in Owensville, MO on my drive out here this afternoon. Folks, this is Hawley Country.
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Kim-Joy, Malfoy, forget-me-not. Is it poinsettia time?
How near then are we to the holidays again, this time of year?
A study shows that leaving up your Christmas lights, year-
round, leads to a 19% rise in overall happiness. A higher electric
bill, yes...
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I.
Dateline Farm. First tea of the season. October 11—kind of late for first tea, methinks. B agrees. It's Thursday. She took a sicker.
It's sunny and breezy. The blue jays make ratchety calls. All in all the place was in good shape upon our arrival. The freezer was running strong. The four trays of ice were cold and full. I cracked them and filled the owl, part-way. It amazes me that old freezer works so well. Even the fridge compartment had a chill to it, which isn't always true. I was here three weeks ago; left it running in anticipation...
Itinerant. Now there's a good word I don't use, have never used, to my recollection. It means "passing about a country". That's the adjective, as in "itinerant laborer" or "itinerant preacher". But there's also a noun version: "one who travels from place to place".
And I'm thinking this might be fitting for us as we head to Chicago tomorrow, knowing the route I'm looking at taking, off-highway, through all those random little Illinois farm towns, Raymond and Stonington; Blue Mound and Boody; Pontiac and Ransom...
Hotel lobby, the comings and goings of guests. I emailed a PDF of the house building plans to the front desk with a request that they print it for me. Information continues to trickle in, about what we will be doing. According to the itinerary Dan sent out to all of the participants by email, "This mission trip is an intergenerational trip" where we will be "building houses in a depressed area of Tijuana."
Last night Graham informed me he and I are in charge of Van 7. I thought that had an eponymous ring to it. "Van 7", like it's a movie, or at least there's a trailer for a putative thriller called "Van 7" where a couple of guys—brothers-in-law: one a pastor, the other an underachieving blogger—are part of a church group that goes into Mexico except their particular part of the group ends up getting lost, drives into a bad part of Tijuana, has to use their fledgling Spanish, a little bit of luck, and the grace of God to get out alive, et cetera. It's actually not a bad idea...
* The pillowcase. I wasn't happy with the resting place the lumpy pillowcase offered. It's not the pillowcase's fault. When I woke at night after I got the good air mat from Frank what woke me up was my sleeping mind's dissatisfaction with the lumpy pillowcase. It was lumpy, it was damp, it was full of dirty wadded-up clothes or my balled-up second towel. What ended up working the last night was to stuff just the bottom compartment of my backpack and then put the neck pillow on top of that. So forget the pillowcase.
* Backpacking airmats. Completely useless unless I can sleep on my back. What just gives me an everlasting chuckle is how somewhere during the first night as I was tossing and turning on my mat—and as Graham was tossing and turning on his—I heard him completely let the air out of his mat, like a mat assassination. I don't know if that is what he was trying to do, in some sort of "F this mat" move but as the air was going out I thought to myself, "We should probably move on from these mats..."
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