It got dark early today. Sometime between going to sleep on Saturday night and waking up on Sunday morning, the time was changed, or so I hear. The time was just...changed. And so now we have entered that season of short days with diffused, slanting light, and soon we'll be in the midst of month after month of dark, grey, drizzling weather highlighted by 3 day blizzards and severe and lingering cases of cabin fever. And oh, if I but only had a cabin to have such a fever in...
I live in one room. I am an adult, I have some stuff; I am used to having some space around me having come from The 4, and yet I now live in one 7'x12' room. 7'x12'...7'x12'. A twin bed. A chair. Bookcase. No desk. Two lamps. Half of a closet and chest of drawers. A flourescent ceiling light (hummmmmmm). 7'x12'. That's my range now. One window. No temperature control. Recycled air. A public restroom for all the associated activities...7'x12'.
Acres? Hah!, They've never even heard of them here. Feet is how they measure things here. 7'x12'. A kitchen, you ask? Nope. Cafeteria. Spaghetti and lots of it. Carbo overload. Carbo sedation after lunch. Bad coffee. Fiber free zone. Powdered milk and Tang for orange juice. You don't like it? Tough. My brother in law was in the Marines for 10 years. He visited me a year and a half ago and his jaw dropped. "Worse than any barracks I've seen" said the guy who has lived in BEIRUT!
I am thinking now of walking through the fields in west-central Missouri. Coming out of the timber into the clearing where the grass is a hundred different shades of brown and tan. An overcast sky with a northwest wind. A stock pond with a few dry cottonwoods on the bank, and a small, round area of field grass that has been bent down where the deer slept last night. The dog has followed me from the house and he chases out after something back into the woods. I can pick up the smell of woodsmoke and it makes me want a wee bit of scotch to wash it down with. Across a shallow draw I see the field with silage left after the milo was cut. Corduroy brown fields and a small rise covered with cedars to frame it in back. I hear the Canadians before I see them flying over me in a straggling V shape on their way down to Mexico. It's 4:30 in the afternoon. It gets dark this time of day in New England, but here, well, here it's almost perfect. I know winter's coming. I can feel it in the damp wind coming down from South Dakota. It's November, and I am going back to the house and I will drink some coffee and play my guitar and wonder where the light goes when the time changes. It's the woodsmoke and whiskey time of year.
be good.
I live in one room. I am an adult, I have some stuff; I am used to having some space around me having come from The 4, and yet I now live in one 7'x12' room. 7'x12'...7'x12'. A twin bed. A chair. Bookcase. No desk. Two lamps. Half of a closet and chest of drawers. A flourescent ceiling light (hummmmmmm). 7'x12'. That's my range now. One window. No temperature control. Recycled air. A public restroom for all the associated activities...7'x12'.
Acres? Hah!, They've never even heard of them here. Feet is how they measure things here. 7'x12'. A kitchen, you ask? Nope. Cafeteria. Spaghetti and lots of it. Carbo overload. Carbo sedation after lunch. Bad coffee. Fiber free zone. Powdered milk and Tang for orange juice. You don't like it? Tough. My brother in law was in the Marines for 10 years. He visited me a year and a half ago and his jaw dropped. "Worse than any barracks I've seen" said the guy who has lived in BEIRUT!
I am thinking now of walking through the fields in west-central Missouri. Coming out of the timber into the clearing where the grass is a hundred different shades of brown and tan. An overcast sky with a northwest wind. A stock pond with a few dry cottonwoods on the bank, and a small, round area of field grass that has been bent down where the deer slept last night. The dog has followed me from the house and he chases out after something back into the woods. I can pick up the smell of woodsmoke and it makes me want a wee bit of scotch to wash it down with. Across a shallow draw I see the field with silage left after the milo was cut. Corduroy brown fields and a small rise covered with cedars to frame it in back. I hear the Canadians before I see them flying over me in a straggling V shape on their way down to Mexico. It's 4:30 in the afternoon. It gets dark this time of day in New England, but here, well, here it's almost perfect. I know winter's coming. I can feel it in the damp wind coming down from South Dakota. It's November, and I am going back to the house and I will drink some coffee and play my guitar and wonder where the light goes when the time changes. It's the woodsmoke and whiskey time of year.
be good.
posted by mwc at 7:59 PM
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