Soggy Porch Chair Cushions

 

Empathized a bit with the pandemic youth out there.  The youth who take all their classes on-line.  A training, I had.   Trainings are good.  In a corporate setting they can be for a day or two or longer.  But on Zoom they are very difficult to concentrate on, aren’t they?  Sitting at a computer with access to everything and the ability to step away, one labors to concentrate and be genuine. 

 

It's Monday.  It’s raining.  It’s Columbus Day, Indigenous People’s Day and the schools are closed.  I won’t be driving my daughter over to school this morning.  But I’m only one of a few people in the U.S. on this call and the holiday has no relevance.  It’s raining.  We can always use some rain.  But it effects the mood and I’m sullen.  I bring the training with me and set it up in the vestibule dutifully turned up high, and with my shoes, dog-heeled down I slosh out on the porch and lug the soggy porch chair cushions inside, one by one.

A new book.  A second ‘western’ in a row.  Read Sebastian Barry’s “Days Without End” over the weekend, which was an oddly intimate invitation to Irish immigrant innocence and soldierly evil as narrated by the young Thomas McNulty. But I wasn’t invested and I found it a quick read.  This morning’s western has also been up on my shelf since I’d impulse grabbed it after seeing it referred to the other reading-man’s western on the back of John William’s “Butcher’s Crossing.”  “Warlock” has been reprinted by (read: unimpeachably legitimized by) the New York Review of Books.  Dense, dusty, conversational, it’s a slower read and soon I’m wondering about just how it was small western communities established law and kept the peace. 

 

It’s still raining.  I can’t move things up from the garage and I can’t go for a bike ride if it’s raining.  But it stops in the early afternoon and I get a cloudy ride in.  I wheelbarrow of books up here into this room.  The colors, I’ll confess, are accentuated in the wet.  And while it feels like nothing could be more natural than these colors it is apparently the case that all this land was covered by yellowy chestnuts that died off in a blight and allowed room for these hickories and oaks and maples to flourish. Every day now a bit more denuded.

 

 

 

Monday, 10/12/20