Hierophany

Hello friends and readers.  I maintained a blog here for over fifteen years but recently I decided to try my words somewhere else.  To that end I have established a new site at

johnbrandall.com


To which I ask and wish you all to join me.  Thank you for your readership over the years.

Sincerely,

johnbrandall.com

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 & Home in Owensville, MO on my drive out here this afternoon.  Folks, this is Hawley Country.

It's just shy of 19:00.  I have removed my vest.  Only now was it warm enough in here—or out there—to do so.  I brought one thermometer from home, then bought another at Orscheln.  There was a thermometer hanging on a nail on the wall in here but it seems to've been dislodged from its nail, fallen and then perhaps been trampled upon during the Fall Par—

Something buzzes my tower!

Crane fly?  Moth?

Boxcar Willie plays now on 'Randall Radio'.

"Hey, mister, can you spare a dime?"

I was writing about thermometers.  I've now got two lying on the table in the kitchen—the stove room—of this old, mold-swept Farmhaus.  One says 52°, the other 54°.  One is still in its packaging.



(The color of the ink changes from green to teal...)

I ate a sandwich.  It was a grilled cheese characterized by a mess a muenster—so chewy and salty.  But I'm lonely as hell, not having fun right now at all.  I miss B and Hugo, I wish Helm were here.  I look forward to being asleep and to waking early.  I'm drinking a third beer but it's just something to do.  I'm nauseous with longing for company.

Why do I do this?

I did get some useful work done once I arrived here this afternoon.  The handle to the front door had been snapped off in October—along with the thermometer it was another casualty of that occasion.  I bought a generic replacement at Orscheln.  They only had one type, albeit in different finishes.

What I bought did not quite fit the existing template of holes on the door here but I had my drill and was able to make new holes in the door.  You can shut the door now.  Sometimes it even shuts on its own.

Then I turned my attention to the back screen door, the screen of which was ripped and useless against the ubiquitous, ceaseless dirt daubers.  I painstakingly removed the system of slats holding the screen in place, then ripped the screen out.

I put in new screen material and put the slats back in place, having to replace some of the lithe, delicate slats.  I'm pretty happy with it.  Whoever put the system in place—it was, I believe, a man called Harry, now deceased, whom I never met—used a brad gun to stun the slats in place.  They held great but were difficult to remove.  I used a skinny flathead screwdriver and a pair of needlenosed pliers.  I was fighting sunset.

But those were the two things I wanted to get done, and did.  So yay.  I feel sick.  The stove's baking compartment is up to 250°.  It's 61° in here, according to the average of the two thermometers.  Pink Floyd now is on the Bluetooth speaker.  This just isn't any fun by myself.  I guess I could read.  It's 19:30.

No stars.  I had stepped outside.  Dark.  But I could hear the spring gushing down below, down the hill from the front door's stoop, flowing strong out of the spring house and on toward the creek.  It was audibly flowing in October, too.  But to hear it from the house, like it were some sort of wind?  Maybe it was just the wind.

I will grab my phone and walk up to the pasture gate, where I get reception-enough to send and receive text messages.  Here in the house my phone is not a phone.  Most times that's fine, preferable even.  Today I wish it worked better.  I am glad I did not try to camp out tonight.  That would have been a cold, dark, lonely form of misery.



(And now the ink changes back to green...)

It felt good to turn the radio on.  I heard a little of Meet the Press, which I used to watch on TV.  I didn't realize it was on the radio.  Now it's Sunday Night Football, Dallas at Philadelphia.  The reception is finicky.

I've done a mediocre job with the fire in the wood stove.  I must've overloaded it, choking it out.  I had to prop the front door open again to usher out the smoke.  My eyes have been watering.  It's 63° or even 64° in here, though.  I was able to shed my hoody.

The new thermometer has a humidity gauge on it as well.  It is 60% humidity, whether that's relative or absolute I'm not sure but I think the former.  One of the teakettles on the stove is slowly adding steam to the air.  Otherwise it would be dry in here.



(Back to teal...)

My air mat now is inflated and lay upon this blue-gray particle-board floor.  I have a pillow and a sleeping bag.  Dallas is— err...  I was about to say...  but the Philadelphia tight end has caught a pass for a touchdown, extra point is good and we have a brand new ballgame.  It's 13-all in the third quarter.

The kitchen is a comfortable 68°.  I am about to crack my fifth beer.  The procession has been:  a Pabst, a High Life, a Hibernation Ale, another Pabst and now another High Life is queued up in a "No Chicken Dance" coozie.

I've grabbed the stories of Breece D'J Pancake from the second bedroom.  I will probably try to use magnets to put up a tarp over the glass portion of the front door.  I keep looking out it, psyching myself out.

With 11:42 left in the fourth quarter, the Cowboys have promptly retaken the lead.  The stove's oven compartment is up to 275°.  It's a 'Jewell Enterprise' wood stove.  I've been burning locust and oak blocks along with one wedge-shaped piece of cedar.

I've now got a grommeted tarp slung across the door, relying in part on a nail that was already planted there on one side of the doorframe.  On the other side I've got a quarter-sized magnet pinning the opposite corner of the tarp to the old metal cabinets that hang over the defunct gas range.  The front door itself was not magnetic.  Likely it is aluminum.

Continuing on a growing, entertaining theme:  the Eagles have now promptly answered a score with a score.  Again the game is tied.


(Back to green —or— Whose tarp is That, Anyway?)

It's a final, 27-20.  The game ended nine yards from overtime.  I'm not a football fan but I like any good sports match on the radio.  I'm sad this one is over.

Now to scan the AM dial.  760 bills itself "The Great Voice of the Great Lakes."  650 is bluegrass.  560 is talking Florida governor recount: voter fraud in Palm Beach, in Broward.  It sounded partisan, which does not interest me.  1660 seems to be part of the Dallas Cowboys radio network.

"Wow, what a game," someone says.

"Brought to you by the official bootmaker of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders."

Scanning through static... down to 1200, ESPN radio.  Out of where, I wonder.  I opened the door to the back porch so I could get what was left in a bottle of Four Roses back there.  I first brought this bottle out here in the spring of 2017.  'Spring Farm 2017' I wrote on it.  A chunk of wood settles in the stove, giving me the heebie-jeebies.

There are about two skinny fingers left in the bottle.  I don't believe I've sipped from it since last November, a little over a year ago.  As I touch the bottle it is cool, as if it were out of the fridge.  There is condensation now toward the bottom.  The difference between the temperature in here and out on the screened-in porch is perhaps 30°.  It is probably 40° outside.

A hiss escapes from the bottle as I loosen the cap...

It's 22:45.  I'm trying to stay awake, sitting askance this... Formica(?)-topped table.  Late-sixties?  I've got my left elbow atop the table, my back to the wall.  It's a good spot.  Straight ahead is the Jewell.  On 1090 is a country/soul/gospel harmony.

"Jesus knows when you're tired and weary, leave it on the altar of prayer... "

NFL highlights on 870.  The Rams won again, 36-31 over Seattle.  Oh, those Rams... they used to be mine before they skipped town.  They are 9-1 in their latest incarnation as the Los Angeles Rams.

There is talk of the California wildfires, talk of the senseless shooting in Thousand Oaks.  A week from tomorrow it's a Monday Night Spectacular, what would have been the battle for Missouri: Rams versus Chiefs.  Both teams are 9-1.

I'm struggling.  The AM goes in and out—why?  Down to 870, WLW, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA ... dot com!  The Saints are good again this year.  We will be in New Orleans on Super Bowl Weekend.  It will be the third time I've been in NOLA on Super Bowl weekend.  Could this be the year the Saints happen to be simultaneously super?

The radio goes auto-off now for the second time.  Oh no you don't.  You are my companion, radio, you must persist.  The auto-off on this little handheld radio turns the radio off once it's been in continuous operation for ninety minutes, meaning I've been running it for three hours.

I'm down to a pinkie finger of Four Roses.  I've got one little Rose remaining.  Adios, whiskey, I relieve you of your post on the back porch.

I keep on adding wood to the stove.  I've got one beer left.  I'll crack it.  There's some Sailor Jerry up in the shed.  It was left here by a Vaughan step-relation.  I've never had any of it but I'm mindful of it.  This night again it will go untouched.  Helm might have some vodka stashed somewhere around here but I'm not about to go looking for it.  There is a stash of grass on the premises.  The longer I stay awake the more that stash comes into play.

Westwood One's Sunday Night Football coverage has now ceased on 870.  NBC Sports Radio has been joined 'in progress'.  The talk is of basketball—the NBA.  I have no interest at all, not in the talk of it, anyway.  If it were a game, maybe.  Curry, Durant, LeBron, hasta luego.

On 840, the Bill Cunningham Show, there is discussion of Oumuamua, that cigar-shaped interstellar object that passed through our solar system last year.  Harvard scientists said it might have been an alien probe.  These scientists were piqued because Oumuamua seemed to change speeds as it passed by Earth.  The frequency falls away from me amidst mention of Jean-Luc Picard and Stephen Hawking.

The origin of Oumuamua: unknown.  The origin of 840 AM:  Louisville, Kentucky.  Bobby Petrino is out as head football coach at the University of Louisville, again.



(The ink changes back to teal...)

Oumuamua was the best of Bill Cunningham tonight.  After that he got very political and partisan, which is, I suppose, what he does.  He trashed our species because of election fraud and abuse in Florida.  He started saying something like, "If Ooma-ooma-ooma really were aliens, they would find us closer on the spectrum of life to parameciums than to them."

Because of Florida 2018!

I thought conservatives were all about believing in the inherent good and potential in every one of us.  That, "If only the government would leave us alone, and not try and help us prosper, then we'd do just fine on our own."  But Florida 2018 makes us parameciums.

Anyway, I was going to omit saying all of that because I heard the rumble of a diesel going by.  For a moment I thought it was coming up the drive.  It felt that close, in my belly, permeating my custom-made world here, with its crackling wood stove fire, the AM radio also crackling, a decades-old fridge making a modem-like, dial-up sort of sound at times, muted though in the way a trumpet can be muted.  Now the old fridge shifts down, calming a bit.

When I heard the truck I grabbed my axe, which I'd already unsheathed.  I went into the middle room and looked out from there.  I guess if I had to, I'd go up into the attic, fight from there.

Back to the music on 650.  Banjo pickin'.  I took a moment and went into what I first knew as 'The Scary Room', a bedroom that sits catty-corner to the kitchen and shares a wall with the screened-in porch.  The wallpaper is peeling in there, off the walls and hanging down from the ceiling.  Spray foam peeks out from wall cavities.  The window's second pane is busted and there's a pile of lady bug and wasp shells in there.  When I vacuumed all the rest of the first floor in March I didn't even think about trying to clean that room.  But, now that I'm looking back on it, I'm not really sure why.  It would have been worth it.

There's also a door in there, leading out onto the screened-in porch, or vice versa.  I remember how the door was open, left open, when this place got hit last year.  That was an ominous sign because otherwise no one uses that door.

Now a tribute to the king of bluegrass.

"They call me by another name," someone sings.

Pickin'.  Fiddle.

There is a bolt lock on the Scary Room's door to the porch but it didn't fit right in the doorway—the bolt couldn't be slid and set.  First I started biting at the doorjamb wood with needle-nose.  That was rash.  I went and got the drill to scour out the settin' hole.  The bolt slides now but it would've been better if I'd only used the drill in the first place.

Status checks.  It's Monday morning, :06.  The bluegrass show ends.  Nashville.  This station is out of Nashville.  Rain there today, high of 46°.  Chance of rain and snow early Tuesday, low of 22° overnight Tuesday.  That's pretty cold for Nashville, for November 13, right?

"The station that made country music famous," it proclaims.

The next song is not bluegrass but a lackluster rockabilly number.

On 1680 the song, "All She Wants to Do is Dance."  Who sings that, Huey Lewis?  Google, what say you?  Alexa?  Siri?  Encyclopedia Brown?  Buehler?


(Back to the green ink...)

Now for some KMOX, 1120.  The temperature is all downhill from here, apparently.  It's 39° in St Louis, heading to 36° by late morning.  There is a chance of some frozen or slushy precipitation.  That'll make for a tricky drive home.

"El Niño," says the meteorologist.  Immediately that image of Chris Farley comes to mind, siempre.  Is it just me or does it seem like El Niño occurs about every three years now?

Unfortunately, and surprisingly, KMOX does not come in all that well.  On 1090 is a ballad of sorts, Christian in nature.

Sliding down the dial to 780 I catch a rundown of Chicagoland traffic, a mention of Butterfield Road, the Eisenhower, the Dan Ryan.  It's WBBM News Radio.

"Good morning, I'm Bob Conway," he says.

The top story is—auto off!—the rising body count resulting from the so-called Camp Fire, 29 dead, in Northern California, near the now-decimated town of Paradise.

Meanwhile, another serious fire burns quite a ways south in the same state, threatening Malibu.  Where did these fires come from?  They're like that last hurricane, I think it was Michael, that quickly gathered itself south of Cuba before barreling into the Florida gulf coast west of Panama Beach.

Wildfires in November?  Here it is has been too damp and chilly for any kind of fire.  California's governor cites drought conditions.

It's :36.



(Back to teal...)

Dow futures are up 66 points.  It's 2:04.

I laid down for a little bit but I didn't sleep much.

It struck me that I should get up and make sure the fire was still going.  There were only coals.  Hoping for a smooth restart I erred by adding too much wood back to the stove at first, choking the coals out.  For a restart atop coals in that stove it really has to be one piece of wood added back at a time.  I had to get some paper in there and set it alight.  Even though there were glowing coals nothing seemed capable of catching.

Nonetheless, it's still about 72° here in the kitchen.  There was another auto-off.  Quickly I turned the power back on and 780 is playing again from Chicago.  I am suddenly hungry.



(Back to green...)

americarecyclesday.com, November 15

I drank a Canada Dry.  I added more wood to the stove.  In the oven compartment sits now a potato, slathered in oil and spices, wrapped in two layers of aluminum foil.  It's 2:49.  I am going to sleep really well, sooner or later.



(Back to teal...)

I was up at six.  It's 8:32 now.  It's snowing.  I'm packing up, cleaning.  I put the potato fixins on the potato and put it back in the oven.  It cooked up real nice.

Down the road, across the way, up toward the Alder Springs ridge comes the guttural sound of a diesel.  At first I thought it was another pickup—scouting, loitering, looking for a wounded deer in the hardwood.  But aye, how wrong.  Walking out a ways for a better view I was able to see that the audial epicenter is Carmack, the farmer.  The hood of a hooded sweatshirt is pulled tight around his face as he sits in the cockpit of a dozer, working a lever back and forth as he takes down trees as old as I am, getting a sort of running start and then just ramming right into their trunks, felling them with ease, their rootwads exposed to the atmosphere all of a sudden, in ugly shock.

And yet the snow continues to fall without making a sound.



—Halfway between Brinktown and Iberia, MO
11.14&15.2018

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.  Higher carbon emissions, sulfur dioxide, all that, yes, but
19% more happy?  It's kind of a no-brainer, isn't it?

Well, I tried it.  I kneaded, folded and proved it.  The decoration,
he said, was a little boring.  The bottom was soggy.  The whole thing
was a bit overdone.  It was all a bit claggy, she said.

Me, I couldn't agree.  It was the hottest night of the year,
they all were.  I sat outside steaming like the gingerbread
man in a random multi-hue.  The moon was hiding,
the dough was rising and I could not stop thinking about the
perfect temp for tomorrow

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.

Turkey vultures float in rising arcs, a woodpecker knocks.  Cows lows in a neighboring field.  Farther away, a chainsaw gnashes its teeth.  We await arrival.


II.

A little after four this afternoon, Doug, Megan and Olivia (their pup) arrived in Doug's red Dodge truck.  B and I had moved some split wood from the shed down to the fire area, and were gathering some kindling before we stopped to greet them.

At this moment there is not a cloud in the sky, not even contrails.  Usually we see a litter of contrails in the sky here.  How can you explain that?  B says maybe because of Hurricane Michael the would-be flights, having been canceled, are not in the air.  Plausible!

Hugo (our dog) and Olivia are a sight to watch.  It's Hugo I don't trust.  He is showing his teeth some and growling—one bark.  Liv wants to play.  He seems to be thinking about sex.

Of the many items to note I'll jot at least one more: the spring is really flowing, susurrous and full.  Hugo barks at Liv again.  We just haven't had him around other dogs enough.  I feel wary and amateurish.


III.

House thermometer says 57°.

At a-quarter-to-five, the next arrival: Eric, Michelle and Olivia.  Olivia is their daughter.

I traipsed through the brush down by where we have our fires.  It's a grassy area that slopes away from the house until it levels out, not far from where the spring bubbles up and makes its way toward Little Tavern Creek.  It all sits below a squat, rocky bluff of sorts, hard sandstone I have worked to clear and keep clear over the years.  Toward the creek are established trees, volunteers, bushes, tall grass.  I was in there pulling out kindling and a few heavier branches that had fallen.

Then I walked back up the hill, passing the house, and stood at the pasture gate and just looked out.  Turkey vultures caught my eye, two groups of about thirty each, flying toward the sun.  Then they tightened their formation and began to float slowly upward, in a kaleidoscopic rising dance.  I've never seen TVs do that before, or hadn't until three weeks ago at Meramec State Park.  I've a newfound appreciation for these birds I'd only previously associated with picking at roadkill.  Before if I saw a group of them floating I figured something must be dead down below.

The dance seems to be about gaining warmth in the sun and joining together in some instinctual choreography, some community life I have not seen any other bird display with such languid grace, if at all.

Current head count: seven people and two dogs.

"Not bad for a Thursday," someone says.

No, it's not.

Eric is trying out ad hoc parts for his outdoor wood stove.  He gets these curio pieces from places he demos.  I can remember a friend finding Xanax behind the bookcase of some place he was rehabbing.  That's some chimney Eric's got going, the top pieces still rising to eight feet above the ground, gleaming in chrome or stainless steel, the rest a-rust, having set outside since April, when last we all were here.

Sunset update: getting there, at 17:30.  Not twilight yet, not dusk.

At the approaching sound of an ATV—the farmer—the cows sound off.


IV.   

Thursday night.  Not only are Patrick and Anne Marie both here but the stars are nonpareil.  As I look due east, in a line starting far above and then descending lower toward the horizon is a perfect vertical consisting of Pleiades, Taurus, Orion's belt.  Lurid, formidable, effervescent.  Have the stars looked better here, to anyone, ever?



V.  Friday, 10.12.18

Re-stock:  Dawn.  Patrick and AM arrived last night about 21:00.  Leading up to yesterday, we didn't ask him or anyone if AM was going to be at Farm this weekend.  The odds of her arriving on Thursday we thought were pretty low.  Then they were here.  I was drinking beer by that point, though I had started with two Busch N/A.

My night ended a little after two.  I had smoked a cigarette, which knocked me loopy.  I tried to meditate the lurches away but couldn't cut through the spinning, fogging daze as it enveloped me.  I retched some onto the bed of coals.  My throat was torn up.  I drank water and made my way up the hill, first to the car and then to the tent.

The sky was as clear as possible then.  The rain started about four hours later, maybe as early as five.  Little drops, pinpricks, like sporadic sand pinging the tent.  The condition has persisted.  At 9:50 it's overcast with light rain, 45°F.

__


I am up in the house.  They are out there, down there.  There are two canopies set up by the fire.  It is raining but there were still plenty of hot coals on the fire this morning.  I made two trips up to the house from the fire with a broken-handed shovel, and with B's help, dumped the imported coals into the wood stove.  Inevitably the house smoked in a bit.  But a fire was going in the stove in relatively little time.

I hear Olivia saying something, not quite shouting but proclaiming, projecting.  It's funny about Gerald.  Who's Gerald, you say?   On trash day this week, I saw a strange and grotesque object in the gutter along the curb out in front of our house.  It was a foam replica of a human skull.  My first instinct was to bring it down here, enticing hijinks.  I thought again and tossed the skull into our bin.  Then yesterday B took out a bag of trash.  I was watering the grass.

"What's this?" she asked.

I told her.  Then I said, "Should we take it?"

"Uhh, yeah," she said.

As we unpacked here yesterday I put the skull out on the stoop, on one of the stands out there.  At some point Olivia saw it.  She then mounted it on a stick.  B had some role in conjuring a name for the entity.  We had driven through Gerald, MO on highway 50 yesterday.  The stick-skull figure is thus dubbed Gerald.

So, two fires.  They have rallied the coals down there and I have the stove jogging along up here, my music going, my four- and five-star songs.  This is Idjut Boys' "Another Bird", a Scottish acid jazz dub.  Adam, if you're reading this, you'd dig this song for sure.  I have a cup of Tulsi steeping, and wood to get.  Fall Farm 2018, right where I want to be.

__


At 12:45, Billy arrives.  His phone had him go 63 to 68 to 28 to 133 to Missouri Highway DD to county road 632.  He said DD was paved!

It's two o'clock now.  Chilly.  Rain is off and on but never hard, nothing much beyond a drizzle.  My nose is cold and my hands are cold.  I need another layer; want to go and chuck my phone.  I have a bit of a headache.  We ate veggies.

I ran the saw for a little while, cutting up a medium-sized ash that had fallen and lay over the second-channel a.k.a. the dry creekbed you cross over before getting to the Little Tavern.  Then I cut off more the upper limbs of the big oak near the road that fell a couple years back, propped up by a smaller tree and still off the ground.

It has been tricky to get the fire going again in earnest as folks cook and also with the rain.


Wow, it's Friday night, 22:30, and I am turning in.



V.   Saturday.

Saturday, morning, it's getting light.  I'm down by the fire, with Lanie and Julia.  The fire was in pretty good shape this morning when I returned to it, about 5:40.  I was then unexpectedly joined by the two girls I've mentioned.  They're on the rocks now, in their pyjamas and headlamps.  Playing house!  Master bedroom, porch.  I imagined an amphitheater when those rocks were cleared.  They contemplate couches, TVs, a hallway, bookshelves.

Hugo was out of the tent with me.  I've fed him and he's down here, too, on his bed, on his second leash, after some pie-iron licking.

I didn't expect to find any wood remaining, having gone to bed relatively early.  But maybe I wasn't the only one worn out by yesterday—the moisture, the boisterous young congregants.  My head hurt much of the day, from the usual suspects: alcohol, cannabis, nicotine.  A day later my head still hurts a little and that baffles me.  I had less to drink yesterday that any other day I've spent here: this pastureland halfway between Iberia and Brinktown in Missouri, USA.com.  I had one Bell's brown ale, one Avery imperial oktoberfest and two Busch beers.  I started with two Busch non-alcoholic brews, my pace cars out in front of all the action.

"We forgot about the kitchen, Julia."

It is gratifying to have the rocks clean to the point two girls can clamber upon them in morning's dusk.  I looked up half an hour ago and saw a few stars, the best and the brightest.  Now, some blue sky.  Undeniable, indefatigable, inimitable.  A sight I saw not once yesterday.

The birds are clocking in.  The fire crepitates and hums.  It's oak and ash I cut yesterday from what were already fallen trees.  I mentioned this already, didn't I?

A cardinal now.  A blue jay, farther away.  The girls walked off; my writing flushed them.

"Do you, like, want to be a writer when you grow up?"

"Well, I am kind of grown up already."

"Wait, how old are you?"

"I'm thirty-nine."

I told them what I write—mostly journals, some poems, a few stories.  "But no," I said, "not professionally."

__


Nichols has his A-frame-style pop-up camper down here, this area where we have our campfire, call it the Firegrounds.  He rented the pop-up from some outfit, or maybe just from some lady, name of M B Thomas.

Crows.

I'd love to see some geese overhead.  Snow geese, I'm talking, their almost imperceptible tight and thin high V.  But some Canadas would do fine, too.  Maybe it's too late for the snow geese by this time of the season.  Who knows anymore?  Do the birds even know what they're supposed to do?

Writing without my glasses on strains m'eyes, refers tightness back into my head.

"Wait, Julia, what do you want, like, Sprite?"

"I'm not thirsty."

"I'm just gonna get a Sprite."

Their decibel level rises with the growing of the light.  There's gotta be some folks in tents thinking WTF!?

I look around at the ground.  Beer cans, Busch Light and Bud Light.  Chair bags.  A tarp and a shower liner that laid atop two wood piles yesterday in the drizzle.  The forecast had rain possible tonight.  I've got most of the remaining wood stove on end in a ring around the fire, in the fashion of a palisade, a loose circular enclosure composed of individual pickets.  It was AM yesterday saying we should be taking the up-next wood and ringing the fire with it, to warm it and dry it out a little before putting it on the coals.  I like how it looks, too.


VI.  Sunday.

Sunday morning.  Drizzle back in effect.

At 10:09, we leave.

At 16:17, I sit down in bed, and sigh.




VII.  The Way Home.

Back home the bereftness takes hold of me.  I transport back to the roads we took home.  County Road 632, Missouri Highway DD—a road I had never traveled, a paved road through rolling, picturesque cattle country, the colors even more lurid because of the mist, the greens more supple, the cows like holy statues, every sight playing up in what was not quite fog.

From DD to 133, which we took north but probably should've taken south instead, toward ... I can't even recall, the route I took was so convoluted, desultory, ad hoc ... to Highway N into Brinktown, past the Catholic church there, just letting out, to Highway 28, to 63 for just a moment toward Vienna where we went east on 42 for a brief stretch.  I left 42 for Route Z, heading east and running into Highway 28, again, this time heading north through Belle and Bland, curving east toward Owensville and hitting, eventually, Highway 50.  It was 50 all the way into Union where we briefly jogged north on Highway 47 before turning right on Route V, over Highway 100 to Route T, back to 100, to Clarkson Road (340), to Clayton Road, to Price Road, to Delmar.  It sounds like a lot but it really was not a bad drive, less than three-and-a-half hours.  I could shorten it easily by staying on 28 and not taking 63 into Vienna.



VIII.  Who Was There.

Jeanie arrived on Saturday, the last arrival.  Me, B; Doug and Megan; Eric, Michelle and Olivia; Patrick and Anne Marie — the nine for Thursday, along with two dogs, Hugo and Olivia.  The stars were brilliant that night, the tent was chilly, I stayed awake to a late hour, I smoked a cigarette that made me retch.

Friday was in the drizzle, but with two canopies and a tarp added to the side of each canopy lean-to style, giving just enough extra room to slide a table out from under the canopy and giving us a little extra space for stashing wood beneath to keep clear of the rain.

Billy was the first there Friday, in his red Flash (lightning bolt) hoodie.  He set his tent up, didn't need help.  Later that night he would find solace in the solitude of his tent, with a bottle of Yoohoo, a clutch of Zebra cakes and some You Tube.  Then it was Jay W with his daughter Julia and her friend Laney.  Laney telling me she got her shoes at Dollar General on the way.  She actually kind of liked them, she said.  Nichols with the A-Frame pop-up rental, his two children, stately Kaya and my apprentice-for-fire-master, Easton.  The Norrs: Ryan, Jamie, Keegan and little Keeley.  Wilson, his beard pure white, a Stag hat; his wife whose name I never asked after and never heard; their children Eli—his upper lip chapped from a habit of aimed-up licking, the same thing I used to do when I was his age, a couple of yearbook photos ruined by it, that sort of false thin mustache running above my top lip, purplish-pink like some sort of birthmark; his interest being more in the ant farm than in the monkey bars, his distaste for pizza....

Which reminds me of Laney and all the mayo she was putting on her hot dogs, made for her by B, who also made Laney and Julia grilled cheeses Saturday morning when they shocked me by showing up so early to the fire, when I thought I was going to have some time there by myself.

And finally Wilson's daughter Clara, who was even tinier than Keeley.  That made 24 for Friday night.  There were only two Saturday arrivals:  the aforementioned Jeanie, who is Patrick and Eric's cousin, and then the final arrival, Katrina, who was Jay W's girlfriend, in a zip-up hoodie and with cigarettes going.  Like Billy, their departure Sunday morning was without a goodbye, which is alright.  That was 26 total for Saturday night, then.


IX.  The House.

No one slept in the house, something of a surprise when you consider the precipitation, which in terms of inches wasn't significant but it was wet from Friday morning on through departure.  The air was wet, the rock was gleaming, the trees were dripping, the grass would dampen your shoes or boots, the spring was running full-bore, the creek water was over the road in two places.  The temperature never rose above 57°F the whole time we were there, though it was likely never below 37°F either.  We saw the sun only on Thursday.  When the clouds broke a bit Saturday morning it was just a deke, the overcast soon obtained again.

We left the house dirtier.  The kitchen floor took a beating.  The handle to the front door—a storm door with its top glass pane duct-taped together—was snapped off at some point, by someone, a child perhaps.  There were yet a couple bags of trash in the house when B and I left (the Vaughans remained, so maybe they grabbed it).  I myself left some dirt in the first bedroom, no doubt, as I did my changing there, removing sawdust-besieged boots and socks.  I will sweep up next time I'm there, which date I intend to be not later than the last of November.



X.  Wood 

There is definitely less wood in a couple spots than there was before we arrived.  I, and others, used wood off the back porch for the stove.  I brought in one load of stove-appropriate pieces from the shed to replenish the the back-porch stock.  Up in the shed, the first pile Helm and I ever collected and placed on one of the old box springs is all but gone.  It was honey locust and ash.  It was a good pile, the box springs were perfect for keeping it aloft.  Some of it still exists on the back porch and is ready for the stove.

I used very little dry wood—shed wood—for our fires down below.  I had left a bundle of State Park wood in the shed in September.  That I took down below and we burned.  Saturday morning I grabbed one of two canvas-carrier loads of dry stuff for the fire, and that we burned almost but not quite entirely as I could see a wedge of oak still hanging around, abandoned in the wet grass as I gave the place a final sweep, the fire still with life as we headed down the washed out driveway.

But I touched none of my secret stash of oak from March.  It's not even shed wood laying instead in the bed of an old detached trailer bed, the wheels so far gone, the trailer ensconced in small volunteer locust and ash, covered further by a layer of branches and brush I tossed atop it.  It can't be completely dry but it's definitely seasoning in there.  A dry month this winter would prime it just right.

There remains also a good bit of the large split pieces I have set on a built-in bench in the first shed bay, which bench I reinforced with boards and spindles, pressing back into existence.  This bay of the shed is uninviting and not especially easy just to waltz into, even perhaps scary to those not familiar with the actual benignity of the shed and its various compartments, all of which make it a good place to stash wood.  I had split those pieces earlier year.  Maybe they need more seasoning but there is a part of me that is saying: If you did not burn much of this wood at a Farm Party beset by rain and chill, when, then, will you burn it?  Will you burn them before someone else does?

__


I cut on a fallen hickory Saturday morning around eleven.  It was on the pasture side of the barbed-wire fence but in actuality it was quite close to the fire spot.  From the fire spot you would climb the rock, get over or through the fence into the pasture, turn to the left and then walk about forty feet through weeds, shrubs and short, young trees.  Patrick, Billy and for a moment Wilson helped me get the sawed logs down to the fire.  Patrick stacked them down there in an aesthetic way.  As we began to go through them we would stack them bit-by-bit on their end around the fire as we had done on Friday.  I had cut the hickory pieces in a way to make them sort of stout and squatly, making them excellent perches for resting a pie-iron on.  The logs circling the fire this way made the coals more accessible to the various, rotating crew of cooks—it allowed multiple cooking access points.  The fire was still smoky but I'd chalk this up in part to the wetness of everything, rain at times falling on the fire as it smoked and burned.

I ran the saw, also, because it gave me something to do.  On Saturday morning especially I was a little nervous and antsy with energy.  I feared getting the hammock out because the children would be attracted to it , perhaps squabble over it, maybe damage it.  If I wanted to get into the hammock and have any peace with it I would've had to take it away, perhaps not out of earshot but certainly out of sight.  And, besides, it wasn't that warm.  The air underneath you in a hammock can feel chilly, and I wouldn't have been in my bag or with a blanket atop me.  So I ran the saw.  It ran well.  Eric et al then ran it for an extended time to fell and buck nine cedars.  I tightened the chain after someone got it pinched, which might have been when they were cutting the third or fourth of their nine cedars, but I haven't looked at it since.  I am a little afraid to inspect it.  No doubt it needs a cleaning.  And, probably, the chain will have dulled.  C'est la farm vie.



XI.  The Three R's.

I am not trying to re-hash the whole weekend here.  I need a shower, though I did take a shower in the house after I cut on the hickory.  The water wasn't as cold as I feared.  The bathroom mirror was even somehow steamed up.

My objective in this account is to have something useful to look back upon.  I want it to be a reference in my continuing effort to do better.  B and I were talking about trash on the drive back, i.e. the trash we all generate at Farm.  B and I have gotten good at not generating trash—the trash has to come back from Farm with someone at weekend's end so why not try not to generate trash at all?

What trash did we generate, B and I?  Floss.  Cotton pads, which we use to apply rubbing alcohol to our underarms.  Tea bag wrappers.  The coffee filters I take outside and chuck grounds and all into the brush.  We did trash the foil that we wrapped our potatoes in.  Beer cans, sure.  But I brought back 50 cans along with with several other recyclables, mostly plastic bottles that held water.  In the cans and bottles we brought back with us more in mass and weight than we ourselves generated or asked anyone else to bring back.

We use reusable sporks—no plastic silverware.  We use steel cups for all of our beverages: coffee, tea, cocktails.  We use Nalgenes or similar plastic or metal canteens from which to drink water.  We drink the well water, from the kitchen tap (was/is the pressure low?  I think it has dropped from prior years).  We have our aluminum, reusable plates.  We wash them in the kitchen, perhaps once a day.  If we use paper towels we burn them.  But, you know, some hand towels or dish rags down by the fire would be kind of nice.  I wouldn't use them to wipe off a dirty plate but I could use them to wipe or dry my hands at times.

I also keep a trash bag in the car.  Hugo's poop bags we collected in an out-of-the-way spot and then put into a larger bag which we took with us at the end of the Party.

We pre-prepped the food we planned to eat.  We brought a dozen kolaches, which worked well again.  Each morning we had one each of the breakfast kolaches, which contain egg, sausage and shredded potato.  We burned the paper box that contained them.  I finished of our little carton of milk this morning.  I put the empty carton back in our cooler.  Our ice bags remained in our cooler the whole time.  They are drying as we speak.  I brought back with us two or three of the Jay We got from Iberia last night.  I will re-use those bags, probably to construct my own big bags of ice for future trips.  One I opened carefully with needle-nose pliers, straightening the staple-like clasp of metal the ice company clamps on there to tie the bag off up top.  They are very reusable, sturdy, unscented bags!  I like our reduce-reuse-recycle style of life is what I'm trying to say.  It's my joie de vivre.  I want to spread the word!


XII.  Pack List Review.

I have my list out now.  A yet-unused copy of my "Camp List".  I'm going over it to jog my memory for taking notes.  For Farm next time I know I need: dish soap, a door handle, material to fix the back door screen, tea, coffee filters.  I didn't put my shovel away correctly this morning.  I usually hide it in the shed.  I never actually used it this weekend because I was using the port-a-pottie.  But I had gotten it out, made it visible.  I saw Jay We with it but I saw him put it back more or less where he found it.

I forgot to wear my biteguard last night.  If I was grinding my teeth, it wasn't extreme—not like that night I forgot to wear it at Spring Farm 2017.  I used the egg-shaped ball of lip balm in the camp kit, right before eating one night.  It has a flavor/scent that marred my eating experience so it might be on the chopping block.

I did use ear plugs Friday night.  I never put any deet on and haven't closely checked myself for ticks.  I do want to use some liquid shower soap out there.

I didn't do any reading while I was there.  Any downtime I have there is devoted to drinking and socialiZing.  Which is fine!  But I have two trusted books in the house, Pancake and Baxter.

I needed the mini-USB cord when my speaker went kaput last night and we wanted to link B's phone to it to play dance music.  I had that cord in the camp kit—I thought!  Or I had one in the boot of the car—I thought!  But could not find one in either spot.  I would have used the cord to connect my speaker to my battery pack, which otherwise I did not use, alas.

I spent no money on the trip.  B charged 14.15 gallons of gas at the Casey's in Belle on our way back.

The batteries in our head lamps must be running low but I did not deploy or mess with any batteries this weekend.

We had our rain jackets on a lot.  We didn't use the ponchos.  The canopies served us well.  One was Doug's, one belonged to Eric and Michelle.  We did use our lantern but even better was Doug's LED light/fan that he was able to mount or attach to one of the ceiling struts of the canopy, distributing plenty of light in that canopy, which Hugo seemed to find comforting.

I didn't use my ballglove though I did toss whiffle batting practice to Keegan in the grassy area between the house and the fire for about half an hour, shagging the hits myself.  I enjoyed it.  He likes the ball low and away.

I brushed Hugo's teeth once.  I need to do that now, in fact.  Get a better carabiner on one end of his second leash.

I wore long johns Friday and needed them.  I didn't take my axe but I kind of wish I had.  Some of the wood I freshly cut I could've split—to diversify what we were adding to the fire.  There are times when you just can't toss an unsplit log onto a fire that you are also trying to cook upon—the fire isn't big enough or hot enough, the unsplit round won't flame.  It'll burn down eventually but it will throw off a lot of smoke along the way.

One of the box fans in the house works?  I couldn't believe it.  There are two or three.  I thought I had tried them all but I saw one working.  They had got it going to blow out smoke from the kitchen when they started up the woodstove on Saturday.

Doug left behind his good recliner-chair.  It's under a bed in the first bedroom—don't forget.

"I'm donating this," he said.  He couldn't fit it in his truck bed upon re-packing for the drive back home.

__


We brought back—an accident—a pillow I'd taken down there, to leave, earlier this year.  B grabbed it out of the house when she decided the Casper pillow I packed for her was not good enough.  She wanted to leave the Casper there but I use it here sometimes, as a supplement (on its own, I concur, it is not enough pillow).

The big "thermal-insulated" Kinco gloves I had this weekend were great for fire-work and comfy otherwise.  I can't wear them for more than a moment during the summer but they were perfect in the damp and chill.  I could stock another pair.

Speaking of gloves....  I now have no gloves—or, OK, one pair—down there.  The left middle finger of one of my orange pair has worn through, making the entire pair useless.  For some reason, maybe just bad luck, when one of the halves of a pair of my gloves wears out first it is always the left glove!  I have at least a couple of odd righties but no odd lefties to go with them.  Why can't we all just get along?

We took four hardboiled eggs, ate none.  We took granola, didn't eat any of it.  I am so busy on wood and on the house and then so focused on people and the fire when I'm at Farm Party that I don't really eat much.  I also accept offered food.  It's a sort of grace, to welcome and to take what is offered.  I'm practising at it.  I ate a sausage patty Billy had made (Roxanne was not there).  I made two bloody Mary's a la Jay We and his bloody Mary bar.  He had fixins, too: olives, sausage, cheese sticks.  I ate five of those olives and several slices of the sausage.

I didn't touch the fire at all this morning.  Billy was down there at seven stoking it.  Easton was working on it after that.  Some of the logs I cut were still stacked where Patrick had left them except this morning they were covered in what must've been a mix of dew and rain.

As the weekend fades away from me I keep hearing that sound of something hitting the sides of our tent.  Middle of the night, toward dawn.  With a twang almost, a rubbing-up against, a membrane's falling.  As I lay in the tent I could not figure it.  Cedar branch?  Deer?  Mere water?

As we were taking down the tent I saw a grasshopper on the fly.  I think it was the culprit.  They fling themselves at the tent, landing with that twangy ping, a pulse of reverberation.  Percussion.  It is like they are boomeranging themselves, trampolining, having fun.


—  Richwoods Township,
      Missouri, USA







P.S.

"You've got Trump hair."

"Me?"

"He's not orange though."

"Trump is."

"Yeah, he's orange."

"He's a Cheetoh."

"The Cheetoh-in-Chief!"

I.  Prologue:  Illinois Itinerants.

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.

Now what's interesting as I look at the definition for itinerary, a word I thought of as "the agenda or list of projected times and places for a trip" is that this isn't the definition in this dictionary.  Here, itinerary is "a route, a record of a journey; a traveler's guidebook or outline of a route."  As referring to "a record of a journey" I have never heard itinerary used.  I've always thought of itinerary as forward-looking, but here that's listed as the third of three definitions, and even then it's a bit of a stretch, the "outline" of a route being rather different than a list of what it is you are planning to do on the whole of a trip.

As a "record" of a trip, the itinerary is reflective, looking back.  I like this sense of the word.  I've never been comfortable calling my writing "travel log" or "travelogue", either moniker being clunky.  I'd use "itinerary" if I didn't think it would be confusing.


II.  Oswego Diner Confession.

"Forgive me, Mother, for I have sinned."

"It's only been four days since your last confession, son.  That disposable silverware fiasco at the Korean taco joint."

"I know, I know.  You don't have to remind me.  I'm so mad at myself already."

"Go on then, love, let me have it.  Only then can I see if there's some way I can handle this one, too."

"Well, my wife and I are traveling—it's all a little hectic.  We're not exactly in the midst of our routines, OK?  We went out for breakfast this morning."

"I think I know where this is going.  Continue."

"We had eaten Caesar salads out of reusable plastic containers last night.  I cleaned them this morning.  They were prime.  They were right there before my eyes.  But—"

"You did the groundwork, but then—"

"Yeah.  Everything was in place but then at the last minute I didn't think to bring the container to the restaurant."

"The styrofoam, the styrofoam...."

"I'm sorry!  I'm beating myself up over it."

"It'll take me a while to fix this one."

"I'll get it right next time.  I'll bring the container."

"You were in here saying that last week.  What am I supposed to do with all this stuff?"

"Don't get mad at me, Mother.  I'm trying my best here.  I had one little slip!"

"I will get mad at you and you will know it.  And you will try harder.  I want you to make it up to me."

"OK...."

"The next time you are about to acquire a plastic bag, be it over ice or chips or lettuce, you are going to find some other way, and you are going to say my name aloud, in the store, so someone else can hear it."

"Mother...."

The sad, silly earthling went on his way, thinking about what it would be like to chew on styrofoam, for breakfast or some other meal, for the next three hundred years.



III.  Schmeer Residence:  Sunday Arrival.

Spliff me 'riffic 'cross your balustrade, madam...

Among my questions: do the radiators still work?  They are silver and speak so plain of yesterday in winter, in the language of knocking.

Some of these bulbs are what I've heard called Edison bulbs, or vintage bulbs.  The filaments go 'round and around, tungsten spun in spiral.  I look at them, I light the bulb, I look away.  The filament glows against the back of my eyelid, branding the hide of my mind's eye.  Where did they get these bulbs, with these helices of tungsten?  I try to go LED, LED: LED mañana, mon frer, the light of luxury today.

I'm sitting at this desk and I'll tell ya.  I'll let you in on a little secret.  Sweet dreams were made of these; this desk was made for me.  Pen on the Welcome notebook is a Lamy, don't know it.  I take the tip in my fingers, spin it, the spring releases, reveals the cartridge.  Made in Germany.  It's funny.  Americans in their way have written plenty of history but most of the writing I do is with pens a la Japan.  Germany is a distant second.

So let's check out this Lamy.  Smooth—not gel but smooth.  It's not a metallic ink but the color is the color of some metal, an alloy: bronze perhaps.  Pewter.  Not quite black, not grey, not gold.  The pen sat atop the Welcome book and I'll get in there, and write—write my piece.  But not yet.  I don't want to have what's written in there—by others before me—be any part of what I'm going to write here.  I'm gonna let my innocence unfold.  I'm gonna melt this beeswax real slow.  I'm gonna mind my own biscuits, stir my own gravy.

The Lamy's not for me.  I'm in deep with these Pilot G2 gels.  They glide, no catch, no caveat, no looking back.  They're dark, they're true, and yet they do not bleed.  They prick the page but all that spills is what I've got to say, about these oak floors, the stained glass windows, the light that winks back at me from the floor, these unusual chairs and quirky lamps—all this rich wood furniture.  We've entered some sort of architectural conservancy showroom—and we might just hold over.

                                                                            **

Heck, I don't know.  He's figured it out so far—he can make it the rest of the way, however far that will be.  



IV.  Monday, day.

a.  A Beach and a Tennis Court

Up early and around the block with Hugo, rounding the corner to find a quiet Clark, finding peace in that, all of last night's people gone, the hilarity gone with them, leaving stillness, like the French Quarter in the morning.  It's just a sliver of the day, barely light, you have to catch it just right.

It was down to the beach with B; down Balmoral to Broadway to Foster, under the train tracks, the red line, under Lakeshore Drive.  Sand and waves breaking.  A man sleeping along the wall outside the bathroom, his belly hanging out, his belongings all around him.  How does a man sleep so sound in such a hard place?  No dogs allowed on the beach.  Dogs on the beach.  One person swimming.  "Probably Russian," said my sister, later, when we told her about the one person swimming.

To get there was sufficient, we turned around.  Got back to Balmoral, pit-sweating.  Turnaround time.  By ten I was headed the other way down Balmoral, west to Damen, quiet walk, turned south, down to Foster and over it, to Amundsen High, a park back behind there, Winnemac.  My brother waiting for me in a red shirt.  We walked past soccer fields, a parking lot, a natural grass and flower installation, a teaching garden, its stand of kale; past Jorndt Stadium, renovated 2004, alive today with wheeled machines replacing the track, putting a new surface down, beeping, backing up, dumping, spreading, rolling.  We played tennis on a cracked court, for an hour, for the first time in years.

Back at my desk, I'm looking at the next-door building, to the east, one step closer to Glenwood.  It's empty, or half-empty.  I haven't seen anyone there at all.  It's being renovated, I guess.  I am looking at the yellow paint flaking from its overhanging eves.  That's metal underneath the flaking yellow—could it be?  I'm not certain.  The flaking does not have the look of paint flaking off of wood.  It's more like how an old, exposed car would look—a vehicle made in the seventies, used in the eighties, abandoned in the nineties, but still sitting outside.  There is a second-story, parapet-wrapped porch, two doors leading out to it, both doors also flaking yellow with old paint.  There are two light fixtures on the porch, neither with a bulb in place.  It's raining now.  I'll catch a shower.



b.  Shower Stall

"Did you write anything while you were there?"

"Yeah, I wrote.  Nothing with any sort of form or purpose."

As we were walking back from the beach this morning, along Balmoral nearing the Schmeer Residence, there was some commotion, a din, an eruption from the driver of a car waylaid on Balmoral, blocked from advancing by the double-park of a moving truck.

"Nice.  Nice job.  Nice fucking job!  Jesus fucking Christ!"

The words carried with them concussive impact; invoked a galvanic response.  They made me want never to swear again, the words so ineffectual and purposeless.  I curse mostly to myself, usually out of impatience and immaturity.  A handful of cars then slowly backed their way up Balmoral (it is a one-way street headed east, usually).  Eventually a maroon compact car arrived and pulled behind the moving truck, putting its flashers on.  Its driver must have done something to alleviate the jam; take ownership; get the moving truck to sidle over; assuage the stifled flow.

Window units whir and kick in our rented space.  This desktop—that I dreamed once held the hand of Hemingway, was designed by F. L. Wright or Mies van der Rohe—is of Chinese origin.  It is handsome, dark, flat and sturdy.  It holds my elbow, my forearm and my volume of Naipaul.  My smudges.  That shower!



c.  Deep, Deep Pizza

Hang an 'L' in the window, put out that flag.  Aye, but the Redbirds lost yesterday, too...

What was I doing in there, all the books I didn't get?  Giordano's lurched in my stomach like an Oldsmobile reeling off its blocks.  Didn't want that Baxter, that Powers, that Offutt.  Then I was thinking about finding a copy of Arctic Dreams but at that moment I had it confused with The Snow Leopard.  Ravenswood Used Books has their travel writing arranged geographically so I was looking all over the Himalayas and Greater Asia for a book that never set foot on that continent, took place five thousand miles away.

"Pepperoni, green peppers and olives.  No not olives.  Onions.  I don't know why I said that."

Songs playing while we were at the pizza lunch with my brother included "Let's Hear it for the Boy", "Turn the Radio Up", something by Huey Lewis, something by George Michael.

Windy, meaty myths.  Fey smile, bad moustache, good pizza.

Where do we live?  Do we?  In what direction is that?




V.  Monday Mullion Majesty

Mullions—"stone mullions"—no idea.   "A vertical bar between the panes of glass in a window."  Naipaul writes of "A corridor;  thick walls, stone mullions in the window;  a door to the big kitchen."  I continue to assemble my kit of architectural terms, by and for the mullions.

a.  Balmoral Obersvations

A Penske rental van pulls to a stop on the other side of the street, out of the way a little.  Delivery.  The driver/delivery man hauls out what sure looked like a case of bottled Budweiser, hoisted on his shoulder like a boombox, leaving it on the doorstep.  Back in the truck he sits and waits, the taillights flashing red.  Portico now.  He left the case of Budweiser on the doorstep, underneath the portico, safe from the rain, the smooth columns standing sentry against would-be pirates.

portico— a structure consisting of a roof supported by columns at regular intervals, typically attached as a porch to a building.  Portico.  Not quite a porch.  A covered stoop, with columns.  Not necessarily with stairs, leading up to a landing, the door.  But these two porticos I espy both have stairs leading up to them, in each case six stairs.  And in each case the first step is of stone, the rest of wood, painted.

In last light, dusk, the moment before dinner.  Two men are stooped to read the sign Paula planted only today, opposing some restriction to building additions—.  B comes up behind me, rubs my back, it feels good, bordering on caress.  But there is a facetiousness to it.

"Land of Men," she whispers.  That's the book I got today: Antonya Nelson.  It's sitting here on the desk.  I'm sidetracked.  Amused, but sidetracked.

"OK, stop it.  I'm in the middle of something," I say.

I was talking about two men, in their fifties or sixties, one wearing blue canvas shoes, stopped to squint at Paula's objection on a sign, in fading light.  I have a second-story view on them.  One is bald; the other is balding and combed over.  It's a matter of local politics, or local policy.  Is there a difference?  I don't live here.  I can't get involved.  I'll just turn on a light and listen to the cicadas rehearse their opening act.

I dash out a text to my sister:  "B is talking up Pearl's for dinner tomorrow.  Do you (and Jesús) want to join us?"

                                                                            **

The rain has stopped.  It's been stopped for awhile now.  The sky has even lightened a bit.  Cars regularly course by on Balmoral, its residents finding a place for their cars, ascending stoops in their finer clothes, stepping inside to sigh and loose them for casual ones, put the dog on a leash, step back outside for a short walk, before mealtime.  There are retirees here too, though.  The grey-haired and orderly, intent on this place being their home, not looking abroad, their itinerant days a memory.

A baseball game.  Ray's HotCut, from Boston.  It's an open day on the Cubs schedule but the White Sox are in action, in half an hour, from Minnesota.

Lots of flip-flops.  I did the long walk to lunch in my Toms.  I had already walked to; and then played tennis in my sneakers.  I made it through the long walk in my Toms but my feet are not real happy with me.  We took the bus back from lunch: the number 50 from Montrose and Damen.  It began to rain as the bus conveyed us north.  We had our rain jackets and also a small umbrella, which we took out as we backtracked from Catalpa, where we disembarked, having overshot our mark a bit, not knowing the stops and not at all confident in pulling the string.  I look down below and there they are, from Clark, having done, I imagine, the block.

                                                                       

b.  Dim Sum Bulbs

These vintage bulbs, though, are not at all powerful.

"There's no lumens there," he said.  "There is no 'low-watt LED equivalence'."

I built a Frank Lloyd Wright house but it had dim bulbs.

"Dim sum bulbs, dim sum bulbs, the lights in here are some dim sum bulbs..."

As they are incandescent, I'd estimate them at about 40-watt.  A few-hundred lumens, at most, mitigated further by the shades ensconcing them.  I can write by it, for a bit.  To read by this light I'd have to have my book open right at the lamp's base, catching the light before it could land anywhere else.


c.  A Conversation that Didn't Actually Happen

"Did you have any luck?"

"Just the one book."

"Hmmph.  And you were back there a while."

"Yeah.  I just don't have my used bookstore fastball.  The used bookstore by me back home is no more."

"It went out of business?"

"No, it's still there.  It just doesn't do used anymore."

"That's a shame."

"It really is.  I saw on your sign you do trade?"

"Absolutely."

"I used to do a lot of trade at my store.  I guess they didn't want to mess with it anymore.  But I could go in there and get comfortable with their inventory, you know?"

"We thrive on our trade."

"I saw a lot I liked but I'm not reading enough these days.  I'm keeping by bookshelves trim."

"Not enough time to read?"

"I'm out of reading shape.  I'm writing though."

"What do you write?"

"Conversations like this one."

"In print?"

"Not yet.  One day.  And when they are, I'll be here, in trade."

                                                                     

d.  The Rain

All of a sudden, with some of the sky to the east still clear of cloud, a flash echoed, thunder sounded and the rain returned.  The calm had walked us into a lull.  All up and down these streets residents are wet, surprised and scrambling.  The rain, as heavy as ever, sheets along the window, shimmering down with liquid gravity.

I am in the funky scoop chair, a drink drained, half an orange B left for me, sitting there uneaten, resting on the cover of the third edition of the AIA Guide to Chicago.

The houses in Andersonville, and in neighboring Edgewater, tend to the quirky and adventurous, piquing my imagination; helping me to form a vision for our own stucco.  For instance, I notice how many wood trims are inset in the stucco, set off with paint.  There are sometimes odd little veins—mullions?—set into the stucco as well: wood elements, antennae.  I don't see those at all in St. Louis.  To add some of these elements to our stucco, as a retrofit, is probably beyond me.  I also like the accent wall in this flat, painted its own blue.  The stained glass windows hang comfortably within, framed in white, very nice.

B exits the bathroom, hand rubbing neck.  She has just washed her face.  Sound of ice cubes!  Hugo is on the couch and you can bet from where he is curled he has eyes on me, or could if he wished.  The rain, the lightning and the HotCut continue.  Kluber starts his seventh inning, Betts bats for Boston.  Betts, 6-3.  Tito pops out of the Cleveland dugout to lift Kluber.  On comes Oliver Pérez.


e.  Extension Cord, Please

One item I might need to emphasize on the "Cabin" trip packlist is an extension cord.  I have it on the list already but, mentally anyway, I associate it with the box fan.  In this case I wish I had considered the extension cord.  Speaking of cabins, JBJ bats.  Bradley, K.  Darn.

I am charging my phone.  If I had an extension cord I could much more easily use the phone whilst it is charging—so worn is its battery, so heavy my reliance upon it regardless.  With the extension cord, I would not need to move a chair; crane my neck; charge my phone as often.  Next time I need to bring a cord, one with some length but nothing heavy duty.  Such a cord would be light and it wouldn't take up much space.  It is simply a matter of packing it.

The HotCut goes to the last of the ninth inning.  Boston trails 5-3.

crepitation—.  That's a good word, but what does it mean?  Naipaul used it to describe the sound and general sensory effect of a growing blaze.  I look it up online and find it defined as "situations where noises are produced by the rubbing of parts one against the others."  I can see it apropos to describe a fire, though: the cracking and crackling sounds; the wood breaking; or, the breaking apart of whatever is on fire.



VI.  Tuesday

Up with Hugo, happy to exit a dream in which I was number 20 in the A line to board a Southwest flight when I realized I hadn't yet gone to the bathroom.  I was deciding whether and when to leave the line.  Then I woke up, quite relieved.

                                                                            **

a.  Walking to Breakfast.

Do you want my rye toast?  Probably not, huh?  Now I think about the container we did not bring—the thing we did not carry.  Even some tinfoil, like for the pizza yesterday, wrap it in some heavy duty foil, wrapped thereafter in a plastic bag, or a cloth bag.  I have all of these ideas when I get to the restaurant.

We are at Pauline's for breakfast, the meal served and eaten.  We liked the spicy ketchup.  The radio is some awful-funny FM morning show.  Parodies and surprise calls.  I'm glad I'm past that.

Back now.  It was a quiet walk, along Ravenswood past Catalpa, up to Gregory and then over Ashland, to Clark.  A very, very light rain started to fall.  It was easier to see than it was to feel.  Hugo noses me.  He often interferes with my attempts to write.  It does not interest him at all.

Breakfast was $32, including a $6 tip.  It was quiet in there.  Compared to downtown, foot traffic, any traffic, is sparse here.  It's nice, city-quaint.  One runner.  Construction for sure.  Streets being resurfaced, buildings renovated.  It's boom status for renovations.  We see FOR RENT signs and wonder.

The walking is the big perk—walking with always somewhere to walk to.  This place, that place, old or new, trusted and unknown.  We don't feel like tourists here, though we are.  Shops open later than I'd expect.  Even the coffee and pie place doesn't open until ten a.m.  Seven is the open for the two diners nearby, including this morning's Pauline's.  Veggie omelet, traditional eggs Benedict, skillet-style potatoes with peppers and onions, sourdough toast.  Asparagus and diced spinach as garnish.  It's not even nine and I think I could nap a bit.  I haven't slept all that much, or well, all this trip.  I miss my nap sleep because it is my deepest sleep, my sober sleep, worth its weight in silver... ahh, yes, I had some dream fragment about silver.  There was something secret about it, I can't recall.

This is a two-family residence.  We are above another apartment, a family of four, the man from Centralia, Illinois, where my mom was born.

It's about to rain again, a minor passing shower.  It's eighteen after ten, the sky darkens to ominous grey.  There is a wind.  Beach hazards remain in effect.


b.  Heirloom Books

Nearing 13:00 I am back at my desk.  I have one of the shades now fully drawn up so that I have a clear view down to Balmoral at what is perhaps a 35° angle.  I can see the north sidewalk (the opposite side of the street) but I cannot see down to the sidewalk on our side of the street.

We walked north up Clark.  It was interesting for a while, as Andersonville persisted before Edgewater took over.  Brunch spots, chiropractors, a tire store, an animal hospital, places to buy eyeglasses.  Then as the noteworthy neighborhood designations fell away so too did any sort of cohesiveness; so too did vibrancy.  Clark became kind of dreary and stultifying and empty and generic.  Chains like White Castle.  A firehouse.  Oil change places, unidentified mechanics' shops set back from the road on suddenly larger and unwanted plots of Clark-facing Chicago.  Then there was a theatre among some newer storefronts just as we arrived at our destination, Heirloom Books.  I thought to myself, "OK, I'm going in."

"Hello, welcome to Heirloom Books," said a woman seated there at a desk just inside the door.  She had a necklace that read 'Chelsea'.  I had read online about the store, wanting to verify it was indeed a used books store.  This was, I believe, the owner.

"You've been here before," she said.

I shook my head.  I don't believe the shop has been open very long.  B and I were in Chicago two years ago; didn't visit any bookstores then; stayed mostly downtown; came north for phö on Argyle; were in Andersonsville on a weekend morning at a packed Svea; made it no further north than that.  Before that trip it had been over ten years since I had been to Chicago.  So, no.

"Well, we have a whole basement full of books.  As you go back the categories are arranged alphabetically and there is a sign on the door describing where they're at," she said.

Or words to that effect.  There were also books on the level upon which we'd entered, plenty of them, including the 'Literature' section.  So I was a little nonplussed: why the emphasis on the basement?  I just headed back.  There was a poetry section with some chapbooks.  Not quite in the tier of paperback, the chapbook is more like a pamphlet made with really nice paper and with a thicker cover.  I looked through a few and passed on them.

But as I write I'm having second-thoughts.  If the chapbook has a flaw it is that it doesn't sit well on a shelf; their spine is not thick enough to have a line of writing on it.  They travel well, though.  If I had considered the approach of traveling with a couple chapbooks and then leaving them behind as a random surprise I think I would have snatched a few of them up.  The erstwhile used books store in my neighborhood used to sell chapbooks.  They're quirky and eclectic; they're what poets used to put out as they ascended in notoriety.  I'd like to have my work in some chapbooks.

The leftover deep dish from yesterday has been pronounced "Ready!"  My tale of the Heirloom basement will have to wait to be told, if at all.


c.  Pleasant Day

An afternoon nap left me waking blunderbussed, with heartburn, saying, "That Charlie Burton sure could tell a joke."

Who is Charlie Burton?  In one life, a musical artist from Nebraska; in another, a man who got rich quick and who told the world about it even quicker.  It seems I woke with the name by accident.

We went down to the liquor store and I bought a bunch of beer, mostly in bottles, and lugged it back.  I'm not going to tell you which beers I got: they all blur together now.  I'll drink most of them, sure, but my main goal was to acquire six distinct beers in order to make up a six-pack sampler for our next-door neighbors (who are getting our mail and keeping our porch and front door clear of packages and flyers).  We watched after their place last month.  They gifted us (me) a mixed sixer from the Pacific Northwest, where they had been traveling.  It's become a happy tradition.  I brought them back some beer from Wisconsin last year.  They've gotten me beer from other places, too.

It's nice out now, a Tuesday afternoon in Andersonville, Chicago, USA—dot com!  It's half-past four.  I could use a shower.  I think it's more humid now inside than it is outside.  The sun is shining and there is a breeze: a very fair late-summer day on the North Side.



VII.  Wednesday 

a.  Morning Coffee

I was up at 5:30, ready to be alive again for our final day in Andersonville.  From the fridge I pulled a mason jar full of cold-brew coffee.  I make this coffee by dumping fresh grounds into a coffee sock (a permeable, canvas windsock-looking bag with an attached metal ring at the top for tying it off).  I slowly add water to the jar by letting it trickle on down through the sock.  Add a little, wait; add a little more, wait; then, stir the water and grinds mixture in the sock because there will persist dry-pocket holdouts.  When enough water has filtered through the sock to fill the jar near to the top I tie off the sock, leave it to floating on the nascent coffee and seal the jar.  I let the jar sit on the kitchen counter for part of the day, six or eight hours.  Then it goes into the fridge.  From a one-quart mason jar—32 ounces, or one-quarter of a gallon—I get three small, strong cups of coffee.

I'm not going to sell you on the mode's efficiency (I add four coffee scoops to the sock) but as part of a traveling coffee kit, one that leaves only the coffee grounds as waste—no filter, no K-cup, no torn-off insta-packet, no styrofoam, no plastic—the method has no peers.  And I like the coffee the process yields.  In a pinch you could probably drink the coffee immediately—as soon as the jar is slowly filled.  The product at this point is dark and looking like coffee but it would be weaker and yet more acrid in this case.  The hours on the counter make it strong; the overnight hours in the fridge mellow it out, hence the moniker: cold-brew.

At a quarter-to-six I was out into the unfamiliar cool of this morning.  Long sleeves could have done.  Hugo accompanied me.  He's done well walking on these streets.  Balmoral, Glenwood, Rascher and Summerdale.


b.  Adios, Art

That painting I had m'eye on is gone.  I was too nonchalant about it.  B looked in the shop's window this morning.  The painting hung not where it had before.

My brother and I played tennis again.  Today we played a full set.  I lost 6-3.  Whenever I tried to hit a shot just a little bit harder I put it in the net.  Still, we each made some nice points.  He landed a few serves I could not even get a racquet on.  The last couple of games reminded me of how it was when we used to play.  Someone would try some volleys at the net but the other would quickly counter with a lob to the back of the court.  Playing more tennis would be good for me but I'm not sure who I could play with.

B went out to the Middle Eastern bakery for falafel and hummus.  We have plans to eat Thai later.  In between we will check out the Andersonville farmer's market.  We leave tomorrow morning.  I've packed a few items away: my rain jacket and some dirty clothes.

Like the rain on Monday, a lot of news has been falling, yesterday and today.  National news, I won't regurgitate the details here.  Are we on the verge of some historic event?  In the country?  In my family?  Could be.  B is back, bag in hand.  I'll eat and take Hugo out, simple and straightforward as it can be.

                                      *

It's two o'clock in the afternoon, Chicago-style.  I've been out on a shopping jag.  That painting is now sitting by the register at Mercantile M.  A red-headed fellow with a curly mustache was sitting there clarking.

"What's the deal with this one," I said.  "This painting here?"

"Oh.  That's got a SOLD tag on it," he said.  "It must've sold yesterday when I was away."

Daggers, bursting, weakness, collapse and death.  It sat there yet only to haunt me the more.  If it's SOLD then why is it still in the store?  What's it gonna take to have it be unsold, and then sold again?  "I'll price it to move.  Name your pleasure, Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance."

Ah, hell.  I had my chance and I frittered it away.  There was another painting in there that was probably worth its $28 price tag.  I liked several items there: wooden boxes, curios, sketches and paintings.  But I wanted that autumn-blazed sunrise landscape, all of $24 it would've cost me.  Yesterday!


c.  Notebook Meta

As consolation that wasn't I went two doors down, to Martha Mae, and dropped $40.79 on a couple of notebooks, neither of which was quite to my specifications.  I like a notebook to be both ruled and spiral-bound.  I bought one spiral-bound notebook, name of Mnemosyne, for $12.  It is of Japanese origin.  It is not lined.  It's not real thick, only about half the number of pages I've got in this lined, spiral-bound Miquelrius I am writing in as I write.  I can't recall what I paid for these Miquelrius notebooks.  Twenty dollars?  I have bought them from numerous bookstores over the years, most recently in New Orleans, at the Tulane University bookstore.

The second notebook I bought today is lined but not spiral-bound.  It's a 'Day Book' made in Washington, D.C.

"I thought only laws were made there," I said.

It was an oddity I could not ignore.  It cost me $25 but it's got 160 pages that would look good once filled with my writing.  The manufacturer's name is Appointed, appntd.com!  It's blue, still wrapped in plastic completed with a ribbon page marker.

"OK, I'll see you soon," she says.

I don't even look, back, over my shoulder.

"You got a bag?" I ask.

She goes and gets one.  She is going to go have a look at that alternative painting-purchase candidate at Mercantile M, an oil scene with water, boats and the buildings of a coastal village in the background, dating from the 1970s.  I told her about it; asked her to go and have a look.

"If you like it, get it," I said.


d.  Open the Windows, Hal

It is pleasant outside.  I tried but I couldn't open any of the windows of the front room here on the second level of The Schmeer Residence.  I had opened a window in the "three seasons" room in the very back of the place.  I opened, also, a window in the kitchen.  And I cracked the bathroom window.  All of the windows I could open were newer, so-called "vinyl windows" I suppose, except nothing about them struck me as being like any vinyl I know.  I'd call them metal windows.

They slid open easily.  They had not been painted, as have all of the older, wood windows in the rest of the flat.  I won't go so far as to say the older windows have been painted shut but they have been relatively recently painted and to open them would take a confident, proprietary hand, which I do not possess.

Is it really Open Window Weather?  Out there, in here?  Or am I acting rashly?  It is 77° and 42% relative humidity.  That's Open Window Weather in my book.  At home we have our AC threshold set at 78°.  We cannot precisely set the humidity percentage in the house but the AC will sometimes kick on to lower the indoor humidity, even if the target temperature obtains.  I'm guessing the humidistat could trigger if the relative humidity in the house were 65% or more.

I can understand the owners not making it easy to free up these windows, considering the wear and tear a caravan of renters could levy them.  Yet, it'd be really pleasant to be sitting up here at this desk with an outside breeze floating through.  It'll be at least a couple more weeks before the miserly weather gods of St Louis allow any of their denizens to open any windows.

Let's look at University City, Missouri's weather right now.  It is 78° with 47% relative humidity.  Well, dang.  Pretty similar.  I stand corrected—it's nice at home, too.


e.  Untitled Radiator Poem

Radiators, radiators
Radiators down & slowly

The taste and texture of tiramisu
Sprinklers after a heavy rain

Clark commerce on a receipt
A perfect painting, SOLD, bittersweet

Brother, sister, future fam
Presidents' men, on the lam

Taking Hugo for a stroll
Rural routes avoid a toll

We didn't swim
We didn't train
But we were urban, and urbane


f.  Wednesday Wind-Down

It's 21:30 on Wednesday evening. We never got a photo with the three of us, me and my siblings.  That was our oversight.

My brother walked here earlier, arriving at 17:10.  I looked out the window, down, and could see him sitting there on the planter parapet.  He couldn't have been there more than 90 seconds.  I was checking frequently today.

We drank a Three Floyds each; watched as the Astros held off the Mariners.  A Seattle fan had a gas mask on.  Not because the Mariners were losing but because wildfire smoke has seriously impacted the air quality there.

Now from the back of the place appear B and my sister.

"Did Nick leave?"

Uh, yeah, like forty-five minutes ago.  I had started to think they had wandered off but didn't want to intrude on them, figuring it most likely they were still talking and wanted to be left alone.  I've got Cardinals at Dodgers now.  B asks me how long ago my brother left.  She grabs his empty beer can.  My sister is still back there, somewhere.  I offered her some of the cucumbers we bought at the farmer's market.  She already has some, she said.

We had gone out for Thai food on Broadway.  Jin Thai.  I got panang.  The curry itself was quite good but the tofu atop it was pretty ordinary, like something I could have made myself.  It made me appreciate the tofu we can get in St Louis.  The tofu I like has a little crust to it; is not so soft; is not smooth; can't be sliced by a butterknife at whisper-speed.  But we were able to walk to this Thai place, and walk back.

The evening we stepped out into after the meal was the finest of the summer: full, breezy, light, affectionate, endearing and sincere.  You say, "How can a night be all those things?"  But if you had been with us, and saw the way that big church there had its utmost edges silhouetted in the cloudless twilight, you would know.



VIII.  Epilogue:  Thursday.

It is Thursday evening, we are back home: my trio of travelers.  We are anti-highway but pro-picnic.  I want to back up though.

a.  Thursday morning

I was up early again, at 5:40.  Dress, put Hugo's harness on him, decide to wait for coffee until we're back, leash him, elect flip-flops.  Out the front door of our rented flat, hit the Emtek button, slide the bolt back into the locked position, down the runner-carpeted stairs, unlock the bottom common door, get Hugo through it.  Turn around, hit 'Emtek', it flashes green, makes the "Quark!" noise, throw the bolt back ... pause ... there's the 'Quark!' noise again.  Now the knob will not affect the bolt, it will only spin.

Out the very front door, which has no lock, into peaceful Chicago not quite cool, though I had long sleeves on today.  We went left toward Clark, south on Clark and then across Clark on Summerdale, past the bank there, past Alamo shoes.  The construction crew working somewhere nearby on Clark was arriving, filling various spots.  Where are they from?  What neighborhood, suburb or town?  What time did they wake up in order to arrive here now?  What time did they go to bed last night?  How much did they have to drink, if any?  What kind of breakfast did they have?

I did a double-take and looked again at one guy who had stepped out of a pickup and stretched his arms to the sky.  He was wearing a fluorescent, yellow-green shirt, the color of a tennis ball, just like the one my brother was wearing yesterday when we played tennis.

It was not my brother though it kind of looked like him, hence the double-take, a sort of instinctual tic.  I would be seeing my brother for breakfast two hours later.

I moved Hugo at a quick pace.  The same stretch of ground on the east side of Clark was getting a little hackneyed for dog-walking purposes so I was over on the west side of Clark to spice things up a little.  It wasn't a long walk.  I was in pack mode.  When we were back up in the flat Hugo quickly made for the kitchen.  B was up and had his food ready, sitting on the floor of the kitchen in his yellow/green travel bowl (that color again).  He scarfed it down as always.


b.  Pack Your Bags

I drank some of my mason jar coffee and began identifying and packing any item I wasn't going to need today, stuffing them into cloth bags, the bucket, the mesh sack, the duffel, the suitcase or my fanny pack.  I asked B to run us each a cup of coffee from the K Cup machine; to let them sit and cool; eventually to add them to our respective travel mugs, along with ice, for the trip home.  Then I reached a point where it was clear I would have to begin packing the cooler—everything else hinged on it.  The cooler was the linchpin.

There was an ample stock of ice in the freezer.  I reached in and started grabbing cubes.  Immediately I lost control of one and it skittered to the floor and broke apart.  Always!  It drives me nuts, dropping cubes, the inevitability of it.  With ice I filled one of our empty plastic tub containers, a Ziploc bag or two and a plastic grocery bag.  Lately I have been trying not to place any 'loose' ice in the cooler, depending on the situation, of course.  The benefit of keeping the ice in some kind of bag or container is that it keeps water from filling the bottom of the cooler.  Plus, I think ice that is packed closely with other ice stays ice longer.

Despite a tinge of regret I raided a cache of ice in the freeZer designated "Ice for Wine Bucket".  It was easy just to take this 'Wine Bucket' ice and divvy it up into my various bags.

I put back into the cooler a few items we brought from home for this trip that we never used.  Yogurt, a chunk of manchego, the majority of the energy balls.  I don't think any of these items has spoiled.  Maybe that sole remaining piece of turkey needs to be tossed but I'd bring all of these items again.  It's like a form of insurance, or it's like buying options on stocks.  We ate a lot of what be brought, all in all.  On the drive up, and in Oswego, we were eating from our cooler for the most part.  Once we got to Andersonville, however, we became very uninterested in our old food.  We wanted that m. henry quiche for breakfast (today was two days in a row for me).


c.  Un-shed

Sufficiently packed, we turned our focus to the morning's remaining major task: removing as much of Hugo's shed hair from the premises as possible.  One useful feature of the Schmeer Residence's upper unit are the various still-functioning—and heavy, and in one case, mosaic-windowed—interior doors.  We closed a door shutting off the back bedrooms, hall and kitchen from the two front rooms (dining room and sitting room).

We started in these two front rooms, with Hugo sequestered in the back.  B pulled the big green blanket we had used to cover the couch and rolled it up.  She used a rubber glove, a lint brush and a lint roller to get any hair that still managed to get around or through our blanket defense.  I swept the hardwood floors and then used the Dyson handheld vacuum we brought (fully charged) to suck up the hair/dust piles as I went, section by section.  The broom was there/theirs.  Good broom.  I had also been sweeping and vacuuming here and there as our time in the flat elapsed.  I'm not going to say we left the place cleaner than we found it but we got a lot of his discarded hair and probably some dust and dirt that was there before we arrived.

I tried to put everything back the way it was: the coasters, the sleeved copy of the piece describing the history of the Schmeer residence, the remotes, et cetera.  I was starting to sweat pretty good, from the coffee, from the sweeping, from the angst of preparing to move on.

We likewise shut the bedroom door and pulled the flannel sheet from atop the bed.  One big sheet across the top was pretty effective at keeping his hair off the comforter, sheets and pillowcases.  B used the lint roller, I used the Dyson after that.  I took the cooler and the suitcase out to the car.  It was time to meet my brother for breakfast.

We walked out to Clark and Balmoral a little before eight.  I couldn't remember if I told my brother to meet us there at the corner or north on Clark at m. henry.  After a couple minutes we decided to walk to the restaurant.  It was bright and mostly quiet.  There are plenty of cars going to and fro at this time in Andersonville but the foot traffic is still pretty light.  This is a pleasant little perk in my book.  Even at eight I can be out and about and still feel like I'm going about my business early and at an off hour.


e.  Breakfast with my bro

We sat out in front of the restaurant and waited, looking down the street.  Eventually I could look south down Clark and see him there, in his red t-shirt and jeans.  My brother, walking in my direction.  It gave me a good feeling.  It wasn't like I felt as though everything was right with the world but I did feel somehow reassured, there was enough reassurance there to power the rest of the day, at least.  And it is very tempting and very moving to pretend for five days that we're living in the same place again, and we can meet up, like it's real casual.  Want to play tennis?  Let's meet at Winnemac at 10.  Oh, wait, how about 10:15?  And we play and he gives me a lift home.  Or we meet for breakfast—he walks a good half hour, to a place "near us" he likes but has only actually been to once.  And I look down the sidewalk and I say to myself, "That's him.  That's my brother."  I can tell by the way he walks, with a little bit of a leaning, looping gait.  "We're going to have breakfast together," I think.

We had our breakfast.  He had pancakes.  They sank him a bit.

"I don't usually eat this much this early," he says.  But he finished them.

I had the rustic peasant quiche, for the second day in a row.  Leeks, cheese, bacon.  Side of greens with the sesame oil vinaigrette.  I also had a pancake on the side.  I do like to eat a big meal early.  Preferably after a good bout of exercise.  We all walked back down Clark, not saying much.  At Balmoral we exchanged hugs and that was it.  I wasn't too sad.  I felt like I'd done something good and maxed out my time in Andersonville.  We enjoyed imagining we were were living there in that handsome, comfortable flat with the stained glass windows, the gleaming hardwood floors, the window units, that gorgeous dining room table with the macadam-inset bowties ... our king bed, wide as the Missouri.

But it was over.  I had a couple more floors to sweep, a few more items to pack.  A food delivery truck had been squatly parked in one of the alleys we were going to need to use in order to get out from the garage.  And there was also a trash truck navigating its way around back there.  Not only did we have to figure out how we were going to get back to St Louis but we faced the much more immediate quandary of how we were going to make it from the garage out to Balmoral.


f.  Rural route home

By the time we were all packed and had done what cleaning we reasonably could muster, the alley was clear.  We took Ashland to Foster, and Foster west out of Chicago.

Past Amundsen High School, past Swedish Covenant Hospital, over the north branch of the Chicago River.  Past North Park University, past Northeastern Illinois University.  Under I-94 and then I-90, into Harwood Heights.  Dropping down a block to Lawrence we continued west, past a forest preserve, under I-294, to Manheim Rd to IL-19 (elsewhere known as W Irving Park Rd.)  We traced the southern boundary of Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD).

South on IL-83 and I can't call it Chicago anymore.  Out there, the chains take over.  Buona, Chick-fil-a, Krave, Kohl's, Portillo's, Starbucks.  Into Oakbrook Terrace: hotels, conference centers, golf clubs and banks.  West on IL-56.  When we see the Hidden Lake Forest Preserve, set low with its grey lakes and green hummocks, we know we will soon be out of Chicagoland entirely.

Danada Forest Preserve.  South on Eola Rd, through northeast Aurora, more warehouses: these days it's all about logistics and e-commerce.  West on 34, past Waubonsie Valley High, where I ran a cross-country meet, past Rush-Copley Medical center, where I went in an ambulance, puking delirious after diving for a ball in left-center but catching instead the center fielder's sturdy right knee with the side of my teenaged head.

We see a Culver's and a sign for Douglas Rd and we realize, "Hey, we've been here before.  Recently.  This is Oswego."

Culver's, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Portillo's, Chili's, Giordano's, take your pick.  34 hits or becomes one with 71, south of the Fox River.  Past Newark, heading southwest, we take a left on E 30th Rd aka County Line Rd and all of a sudden we're in rural Illinois again, passing farm after farm on empty, unlined roads.  We sweep south and west across unsaid Illinois, past field after field of head-high corn and knee-high beans.

It's the end of August.  By this time the crops are mostly done growing, drying up, losing their green and standing in wait of September.


— Chicago / St Louis,
August 2018.