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It was cooler last night. Not cool enough to use more than a sheet as bed covers. Sometime I even had to remove the sheet, but it was a lot better than laying in my own sweat all night or almost worse, running the loud window air-conditioner. As I get older and my body doesn't adapt to it's surrounding like it used to, I almost wished I'd have thought about providing for myself in my old age mo' bettah. Almost....
I keep hearing myself say, "That was then, this is now." Is that the difference between "this" and "that"? I appear to be transiting to an attitude of not indulging either the past or the future so much any more, but only right now. It's not that much of a choice. If I let myself get drifty and not take care of the business of life that's sot before me it only gets more complicated and more dispiriting.
A friend or at least a frequent acquaintance appears to be letting whatever integrity he possessed float away from him. It's like he was floating on the ocean on a collection of individual floating devices that held him high out of the water, and one by one they have drifted away leaving his head barely above the surface.
My concern is that he only thinks he has hit bottom already. What good would it do to convince him that he hasn't yet? He has a job. A house to live it. An old Toyota truck to drive that he manages to keep running. It makes me feel a little bit like a monster to wish for him that he would go ahead and lose it all.
In my opinion he needs to be reduced to realizing that all he has ever had of value is wit and grit. Both are indispensable attributes that can themselves be lost, and if they are, then all hope is gone. Hope is a fickle bitch. Always has been. That's because hope is the only thing anybody got for sale. If you got something against selling hope life is gonna be hard on you like it is me.
Yesterday afternoon I went out into the woods again to see if the ground cover had dried out enough for me to start some more fires to burn it off. I lit some bunches of pine straw that would have normally burned brightly right away, and the flames fizzled out soon after.
After I did that a few times and got the same results I decided to wait until this afternoon. The humidity is forecast to be low for the next couple of days with a fairly soft breeze. Between these two elements creating better burning conditions I'll probably get what I want done.
What I'm attempting to do is remove the ground cover of mostly pine needles and deciduous leaves and briars so I can locate the trench line we buried the water pipe in a decade ago. I've raked some of it away enough to find the top of the trench we dug. The kerf of the trench was only 3-4 inches wide, but laying the pipe and refilling the trench in the sandy land left a mark.
The mark is that the fill dirt settled with the rain over the years and I can literally see the line of the trench, but in other places the color of the fill dirt is more clay-based than the light-colored sand that makes up the top soil. The land around here used to be on the bottom of the ocean. If the Earth keeps warming up it'll be under water again. It's only a 100 feet (30.5 M) above sea level presently.
It could be that this clearing out project may result in me planting some centipede grass seeds in the space I'm opening up in the woods. The reason I'm clearing it out is to be able to walk along the pipe trench in order to discover any leaks before they cost me too much money. If I'm gonna rake the ground cover off on both sides of the trench line, I might as well scatter some seeds and rake them in.
The only problem with centipede is that it takes about three years to mature. I probably won't live long enough to be rewarded with the fruit of my labor by just considering the law of averages. One good thing about that is that if I do croak I won't worry about it.
I'm still getting some rare figs. After the birds totally stripped all the fruit off my fig tree one morning the tree grew some more figs to replace them. I guess in a small way I've had two fruiting periods this year. Yesterday I picked around ten ripe figs. That's the most figs I've had to eat this year.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
