I've Cocked My Arm

The projectiles are lined up on the porch fence.  The door to the outside is unlocked.  I have the zoom bridge on mute.  Another part of the world is talking on this global call.  They’re out there, again.  Quietly, I slide the door open.  As soon as my foot crunches on the ice, they look up and most of the herd dashes off.  One deer remains looking up at me.  He’s hoping I will just go away.  I reach for a block of ice on the porch and by the time I’ve cocked my arm, the deer has dashed off and I send the ice rock flying, but it gets absorbed into the juniper tree and falls to the ground silently. 

This is the seventh or eighth time this morning I’ve repeated this process, after having tossed out a gallon of sunflower seeds.  As I understand it, there really are hunters who climb up into position in the trees, waiting in the cold, for hours sometimes in the hopes that some hapless deer will stroll by, so they can aim and fire.  The deer in my yard, it would seem, cannot be scared away.  The mere sound of gunfire wouldn't mean a thing. 

 

It’s supposed to warm up today.  It’s already over freezing.  The sun is out.  I am hoping that the hard packed ice on the trail has softened up today.  If it really goes up to 45-degrees it will be corn snow out there.  Easy to kick off.  Smooth sailing.  I won’t need a coat.  A fine day, but all that warmth will eat away at the ever-dwindling snow.  It is March 3, today.  How many more snow days can we expect this year?  I doubt we’ll have anything sufficiently commanding with a cold spell behind it to hold much cover beyond the week.  Hope I’m wrong. 

I first came across David Keightley in the Cambridge History of China speaking about the Shang.  Finished one call at 1:30AM and had just a few hours to enjoy before another call commenced at 4:30AM.  I tried to proceed ahead beyond the second page of this book I just received: “These Bones Shall Rise Again,” from 2014.  And so it’s been when there is a bit of down time between calls or nature demands I put pause to calls.  I steal away a few more pages in the is book.  He’s looking at tall, thin necked pottery and musing about: why they made pots that way in, say Shandong but not Shaanxi.   Did they have better spinning wheels? Or a paucity of space in their kilns? Were these people making pots with the posture that they aspired to?  I’d love to do nothing more than simply read this all day long.

 

 

 

Wednesday, 03/03/21