Beans and Elsewhere

My buddy Mike Loyd is retired, and has nothing to do. So on the days I'm out working, he drops by and stokes the fires in my house and shop.

     Now I would marry him for this act of charity alone. But he brings me food, too. Like today, I come home and find this in the shop...   

                                               

                                            a pot...

of beans...



                                                                                   

Mike Loyd is King.

Oh. And look... I wanted to show you this...

the sign I've been working on...

Elsewhere.



Indeed.

Azrael's Wake

The not-so-poetic Lumberjack.

So, I’m out at the sawmill yesterday, converting standing timber into piles of lumber and firewood and mulch. All the while, this ditty is going through my head…


Sorry little tree,

chop, chop, chop.

Sorry little tree,

snap, crackle, pop.

I’m going to build a house,

heat it with wood.

I’m going to build a house,

right where you stood.



… lovely.

Christmas Project #2

The back wall of my shop Friday...

The back wall of my shop today...

It's amazing how much you can get done Christmas day

if you don't do Christmas.

I need more Christmases

Gifts to the Magi

As the villagers had come to believe

that it would bring them prosperity in the New Year,

they carried great gifts of food,

left over from their Christmas tables,

up the mountain

to the Hermit. 





And so it was that the Hermit and his dog, Dog,
would gain fifteen pounds apiece

over the course of three days,
reduce the inside diameter of their arterial walls by half,

and put such a strain on their collective pancreases

the organs would not  fully recover till spring.


My neighbors rock.



'Twas the day before Christmas...

...and not a minute spent in the house.

James Hammock has got himself a dog.

Mike Lloyd and I were out in the shop, bullshitting, one day last week when James dropped in and shocked us with this bit of news. Not that James dispersed it as such. 

     ‘What’ve you been into this morning, Mr. Hammock?’ Mike asked when James poked his head in the door.

     Mike’s a big man. From Ohio originally. In his late sixties I think; white, round and rosy in all of the places that Santa Claus is white, round and rosy. Mike’s got a twinkle in his eye too, but with a bit of a mischievous slant. ‘Oh...’ James said, closing the door behind him. James is in his early forties. His features and physique are headed in much the same direction as Mike’s, only with a dyspeptic twinkle. ‘...not much. Just came in from feedin’ my cows and dog. Saw your truck Mike. Thought I’d come over and see what ya’ll were up to.’

     Mike and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised in big question marks. 'Dog'? Mike mouthed. I shrugged. It was the first I had heard of it.

     You see, in James’s own words, he don’t care nothin’ for no damn dog. The few he has had in his lifetime were coon dogs—working dogs, kept outdoors and admired for their skills, but never extended any more affection than a rewarding pat and ‘attaboy’—and those he had when he was as a kid.

     ‘Oh really? Mike said, ‘A dog?’

     ‘Yep,’ James said, examining a piece of lumber I had standing near the door. He wouldn't look at us directly.

     ‘What kind of dog?’ Mike asked.

     ‘Oh, it’s that old dog of Bret’s. He’s taken up with my cows.’

     'You're feedin' him?'

     'Just scraps.'

     Bret’s another guy who doesn’t care for dogs. Neither does his wife. To appease their six children, though, they packed one home. Two, actually. One took sick as a pup and Bret put it down. The survivor was Max, the dog with James's cows. 

     Max grew up to be a lanky dog, not quite a short-hair but not a long-hair either, mostly white with black and brown blotches. It’s said his father was a Great Pyrenees. Mom must have been a Pointer and the dominate gene donor.

     As it turns out, Bret’s kids don’t care much for dogs either. Max apparently realized this and spent a good deal of the last three months wandering, the Pyrenees in him in search of a more appreciative herd to watch over. Apparently he found it in James’s cows, some six miles up the road.

     Mike and I knew better than to pester James about his new dog. James would probably run Max off just to proove he hadn't gone soft. I told James about Max's Pyrenees blood and we all agreed Max would be good at keeping an eye on the cows.

     I went out with James the other day to check on the herd and to feed Max, who James still referred to as 'that dog.' I was surprised to learn that Max was no longer being fed scraps alone. James had bought Max twenty pounds of the cheapest dog food he could find. He bitched the whole drive over to the pasture about the nine dollars it cost him, a sure sign he was proud of his generosity.

     I saw Max from the road, flopped out in the sunny grass beside his new bovine family. He raised a lazy eye to us when we pulled up to the gate, then, when he recognized the truck, got up and came running.

     ‘Max!’ I hollered, as he came up the hill. He was thin, but his tail was wagging. He looked happy.

     ‘Is that his name? Max?’ James asked, emptying the can of dog feed right there on a patch of roofing tin beside the gate. Max devoured it.

     ‘Yep.’ I thought everyone knew Max's name.

     ‘You watchin’ my cows Max?’

     Max looked up and wagged his tail. He was doing his job.

********** 

     We went out and walked around and among the cows. Max fell in beside James. I slipped back and followed the two of them, listening to James as he pointed out the good and bad among the herd. Max would come back to me, briefly, from time to time, maybe because he knew me, knew I would scratch him, but he always ran back to James’s side. He would nudge James’s hand with his nose. And once, just once, and barely at that, without even a downward glance, James scratched the back of Max's ear.

    Yes. James Hammock has indeed got himself a dog.

Reading Material

Rebecca Stead’s
'When You Reach Me'. 

Siren Song

A

I know your voice well enough, your silhouette. Which is why I worried your wife was who the ambulance had come for last night. Back and forth you stomped in the tiny, cluttered yard as the headlights accumulated.

     “…it hurts all over,” you rumbled, and I wondered what she could be dying of.

     I imagined her, praying for the sound of sirens in her hopeless pink night-shirt, so very afraid, as they loaded her on the stretcher, apologizing for the house, her hair; reaching for her babies, who watched with odd knowing, from a kitchen, or a den maybe.

     Then there was only your yellowed porch light and the consuming silence of a night on the verge of spring. I stood there a while in my own darkness, with your fears, crying. I had never wanted you there. Not just you, anyone... that trailer. But I would never ask that you leave like that—afraid.

     In the morning, I was relieved to hear that it was you and not her, that you had thought you were having a heart attack, but had been down to the store for cigarettes already, so you must be all right.

     Later, I felt the sting of old resentments when they told me that your ‘heart attack’ was nothing but the DT’s, that you had depleted your prescription of morphine tabs by crushing and snorting them—that was why you had 'hurt all over'—and that you had squandered thousands in disability money and pawned off appliances kind hearts had gifted you.

     “I’ve been hooked and I've squandered and pawned,” I said, trying to make some sense of it.

     “You ain’t like them, though,” they told me. “They’ll never amount to nothin’.”

     That may be. But I’ll have to pray and wait for the sound of sirens just the same.

"...it's like red, but not quite."

I'm thinking that some women just shouldn't wear pink...

     My neighbor for instance.

     Yesterday was near enough like spring for her to venture out of the trailer and ‘get some sunshine’, as they say 'round here.

     I might have preferred drawing my conclusion from a greater distance, but, one of her Pitt Bulls got loose and ran up the road to my place. So, here she came, stalking after the dog, like someone’s Olympic power lifting Valentine, pumped from clearing a 520 bench, wearing bubble-gum pink capri’s and blush T.

     It was in the road's dappled sunlight were I first noticed how the color amplifies the lack of femininity in certain wearers. Much like a tutu would a lady rhino.

     The fact that she was calling for the dog wasn’t helping matters in the least.

     “Mongo!”

     Yes, Mongo.

     Rumor has it; she and her man are both ex truck drivers. My guess is from the Conway Twitty, Pall-Mall and PBR era—heavy on the Pall-Malls. She has a certain Wolfman Jack quality to her voice, an emphysema soaked timbre. And don’t forget, this is the South.

     “Mongo baby!” she calls, tender, motherly, gurgley. “Mongo!”

     Then, at the top of her lung,

     “MONGO! GET OVER HERE!"

    "NOW!"

     Mongo pays no heed, and up the road she continues, alternating between redneck mommy and flat-out redneck.

     Do they call it a beer-belly on women? I would hope, at her age, she’s not pregnant.

     Whatever the name, it's well beyond muffin top and the saving graces of vertical stripes.

     I waved hello.

     Mongo was now being enticed with his bone.

     “I’ve got your bone baby!”

     We could probably add use of the word ‘baby’ to the color pink.

     Mongo caved to the bone.

     If I had any doubts about my theory before, they were squelched when the two stalked home.

     Not that my gaze lingered, but my neighbor has one of those unfortunate flat butts, possibly from her years of truck driving, that seem to be perpetually clenched. I’ve seen them a lot in Wal-Mart.

     I haven’t investigated the physics, but the nature of this butt type, will, in a matter of minutes, inflict a sort of wedgy on its possessor. It looks horribly uncomfortably, even from a distance, and always makes me wonder if the person doesn’t need some assistance, say with a stick, to unhitch the garment.

     I’m no Fashionista, but I would think a darker color would go a long way in disguising this dilemma. Certainly not pink.

     But, if pink makes her happy; it makes me happy.

Sarge

A

They had called the old man Sarge. He retired from the Military and then from Ford glass, James told me. ‘Then he went plumb crazy.’ He parked his truck in the washed out drive of what used to be Sarge's house.

     The house didn’t make you doubt Sarge had gone off his rocker. It looked like a play thing, with the holler rising up, high, all around it; some child’s concoction  of remnants, piecemealed onto dry stacked stones there in the creek’s bend.

     James and I crossed the shallow water.

     Inside, the house was squat and icy and smelled of the sweet hay, strewn thick on the floor. The roof was sound, so the bedroom had been bricked up with bales, as was most of the space between it and the modest kitchen, which had become a catch-all for fencing supplies. There was no sign of power or plumbing.

     Holes had been knocked into the walls and ceiling. Sarge's boy had been hunting for the old man’s double pensions. Clearly, Sarge wasn't a big spender. The money had to be somewhere. James had punched his share of holes, too.

     ‘I didn’t find a damn thing,’ James said. ‘That old coot probably buried it out in the yard. He was crazy like that.’

     He might have been. I never met Sarge. James said the old man came up missing one morning though. He went missing for nearly two weeks. Then one day his boy came by the house and found a new, Ford pickup parked out in the yard.

     Turns out, Sarge bought himself a bicycle at a yard sale. He rode the son-of-a-bitch clean to Indianapolis, where he was form originally. There was a Ford dealer up there he’d always done business with. Sarge paid cash for the truck, threw his bicycle in the bed and drove back home.

     Maybe that is crazy. But there's a lot to be said for an old man who can jump on a yard sale bicycle and make it to Indianapolis from Tennessee, then back, in two weeks.

     Anyway, if there is any pension money, Sarge won’t be telling anyone where it's hid.

     ‘He’s down in one of those homes in Gallatin, damn near a vegetable,’ James said as we drove back in the slow rain that had begun to fall. ‘Got that spinal meningitis. Kindly drawin’ up on himself. I guess he’ll keep on, too, till he’s dead.’

     James said that Sarge had had two boys. Twins. The one who knocked holes in his house, and another, who drew up on himself, too, till he was dead.

     ‘His boy says the old man’s gettin’ just dues for never payin’ his son no mind,’ James said. ‘He kindly disowned the kid when he took sick. Then the old bastard didn’t even come see his own blood put in the ground. That's somethin' else, ain't it, doin' your own boy like that.’

     I watched the fence row, choked with saw briar and cedar, pass by us; cattle, huddled in mud and mist, the hills, the valleys.

    
     ‘I reckon it’s gonna snow,’ James said.

     The treetops were dark veins in the low clouds.

     I’ve never been to Indianapolis.

The Last of the Cheese

A

So, Dog and I ate the last of our Christmas cheese yesterday.

Remember? The eight two pound vacuum-sealed wedges I was re-gifted from my neighbor Jackie, the local, lumber and steel-roofing magnate?

As it turns out, I was probably the last neighbor to get the big bag-o-cheese for Christmas. Understandable, considering I’m not known for my bowel and artery restricting diet. Jackie must have known I was hungry. Thank goodness I eat a lot of oatmeal and raisins. Just sayin’.

Anyway, it also turns out, the big bag-o-cheese has a history.

Jackie sells what you need to build a barn. Not the jumping-from-the-hay-mow, big red, Bridges Over Madison County, where Meryl Streep was about as fine as she has ever been, kind of barns. Just ugly, metal boxes… like my shop.

Some guy was building a big, fancy horse barn and bought the roofing material from Jackie. He had Jackie order him a weather vane, too... a weather vane with a cow on it. It didn’t make sense to me either. But anyway, Jackie calls his vendor places the order: One weather vane… with a cow.

It’s around Christmas, and Kelly, the UPS guy, drops a big box off at Jackie’s.

The box has a picture of a cow on it and the weather vane vendor’s address. Logically, Jackie assumes it’s what he ordered for the big-fancy-horse-barn guy and has one of his boys run it out to the job.

It arrives just in time. The guys are still there, working on the big, fancy horse barn. They throw a ladder to the roof and a couple of them scramble up with cow-picture-having box in tow.

They cut it open.

As you might have guessed, there sat eight, two-pound wedges of vacuum sealed cheese, packed in paper grass.

Now, for the ensuing head-scratching and mystery-unraveling to be as priceless as it was, you’d really have to know Jackie, and the boys working on the barn. But since you don't, picture a blend of The Andy Griffith Show, Green Acres and The Dukes of Hazard, with a splash of Quentin Tarantino, for the R-rated language.

Of course, now the vendor will never, ever stop sending Jackie the big-box-of-cheese for Christmas. Who would?

I’m guessing, too, the cheese has rubbed a bit of a sore spot in Jackie's hide, considering his, “Here... We’ve had about all the cheese we can stand,” when he passed the eight two-pound vacuum sealed wedges on to me.

Don't bogart that joint....

...my friend.

Don't ever say that I held out on you...

Four phat joints...

Hardy Har Har...

I had to stop work on the piano for a bit,

to build a small chest before Christmas.

It's a frame and panel box.

Mitered beading on the rails and stiles.

I'll glue up the panel blanks tomorrow.

Oh... They came to pull the Mexicans van out.

The van was facing you when they started,

sitting in that crater there in the foreground

and leaning against that tree it's beside now.

That is to say, it was better off before they started.

Any further down the hill and I will own it,

because I'm sure it will cost more than those

poor Mexican guys want to fork over to get it up and out

of that wash.

Don't worry...

Soon as the ice is off the road

we'll get a tractor and some chain down there

and snatch that van out of there for those boys.

We ain't heartless.

We ain't stupid though, either. 

  

Bananas, Butter and Shingles... A Few of the Many Reasons Chicks Dig Me

So,
I have now opened a banana from the bottom end 

and held a slice of butter in my mouth until it dissolved.

I can't say that I'll be making a habit of either,

but clearly, it's self-expanding experimentation like this,

coupled with the irresistible machismo 

of inventing one's very own shingle making machine

that makes chicks dig me.

No... really.

I made a shingle making machine.

And it works too.

Here, I'll show you...

We're going to use this stuff to make some shingles...

Oak firewood.

Mostly because this is a trial run, and I don't have anything better cut yet.

So,

we take the firewood and screw it down to these squares of plywood.

They're like louvers.

They flip up...

see?

Each piece of plywood will hold at least three blocks of wood...

shingle blanks... about 18 total.

When the blanks are all on and I'm ready to run the sawmill's blade over them,

(it's a bandsaw type and the blade moves horizontally to the work piece)

the plywood louvers will be in the down position.

Like this...

I push this handle...

and BLING!

The louvers pop up 1/2".

This is important.

This is what makes the shingle fat on one end and thin on the other.

This is part of what helps with the popping up.

See that tapered notch?

It rides on this little piece of wood, inside the box... 

This is inside the box...

The horizontal bar is what you were looking at in the photo above...

what the notch rides on. 

The verticals are just stays... guides.

The cut-outs are for venting sawdust.

This is the 'ladder'...

the deal that moves back and forth.

Here you can see the notch and the 1/2" off-set rail that drives the louvers up,

which creates the taper on the shingle.

So this...

went to this...

then here...

to get dressed...

And ended up this...

Only 4000 more to go.

And that is why chicks dig me.

At least my mom does.

Anyway...

The End 

A Visit to Glenda's

A

Yesterday evening was warm. The moon was full and up before the sun had even set. It was a perfect evening, Gloria said, to walk across the road to the big blue barn where Glenda lives, and visit.

When the moon is going to be full, or mostly full, Glenda’s children and their families come to the big blue barn too. They gather there around dusk. When the sun sets, the men will go out to hunt. The women will stay back at the barn, tending the pups, if there are any, and visiting with Glenda.

Glenda is old now. She may be the oldest Red fox ever. Mostly, I think Glenda has lived this long because Gloria has taken care of her... spoiled her. Glenda has never really had to go out and hunt, or be hunted. If Glenda went out, it was just for exercise or to teach her pups.

Most of Glenda’s family was there when Gloria and I arrived. Twenty or more Reds of all sizes. Only four pups though—a late litter. Gloria convinced the mother to keep them up at the blue barn where she could bring them food and bedding if winter got rough.

We waited for the men to leave and then sat down to chat with Glenda and the young mothers. Gloria has been trying to learn Glenda’s entire real name—Glenda’s Red fox name. I don’t know if it’s possible. I think some of a Red fox’s name is in their blood, not just their memory.

I’ve told you about a Red fox’s name haven’t I?

Well, if I haven’t…

It’s kind of hard to explain, but a Red fox’s name is more like a story, a history book… a lineage. Take Glenda’s for instance, (Glenda, by the way, is just what I call her, since I can’t remember three minutes of her real name) Glenda’s fox name is also her mother’s name and her mother’s mother’s name and so on, all the way back to the very first mother of all Red foxes. There are stories too, and extra bits added in for the important foxes, like say, Glenda will probably have something added to her name about being the oldest Red fox ever.

Needless to say, it’s a long name, especially when humans say it. Gloria is doing pretty well at memorizing it, but she’s got a ways to go yet. Glenda gave Gloria another bit to learn last night. And now Gloria will have pups to look in on this winter… plenty of time to visit and learn some more.

Empty House

a

So, I found a place that wanted some of my furniture... the normal stuff. 

This is a good thing.

It will be a better thing if the lady who owns the place can actually sell my furniture.

She seems to think she can.

It's a start.

But here's the problem...

problems...

Now I don't have a kitchen table...

any table at all.

But since most of my meals consist of yogurt in a bowl

I'm dealing.

It's just harder to eat and read at the same time without a table.

I also don't have a bed.

I have a mattress, just no bed....

which I don't mind so much... 

but...

Now my mattress is on the floor...

closer to the ground...

and look at this...

That's right Goldilocks...

Which one of the two bears is supposed to be sleeping on this bed...

not this one?

 

That's one big bedbug.

Little Icky, Big Icky

A

So, normally I don't complain about genetically engineered fruit. 

I probably don't even know when I'm eating it.

But the peaches at Walmart are too big.

I can't take a bite out of them without getting peach up my nose. 

And this, my friends, is too much of a good thing.

And then I came around the corner of the house,

La, La, La

on my way to the mailbox with a Netflix movie...

( 'An Education'...

I wouldn't recommend it)

Only to find this tasty little morsel...

Yikes!
Don't think for a moment that I didn't almost wet my jammies.

That's a deer carcass for you City Mice...
What's left of it anyway.

I'll let you guess who I won't be kissing on the lips for the next week or so. 

How Great is it...

...to sleep in until 6:30 and find out it is only 5:30?

So yesterday, I wrote and wrote.

Then I worked on my shingle machine while I waited for Denny to get Garth Brooks tickets.

Then he and I went to Chuck and Sherry’s and cut down a tree that was going to squash their house someday.

We pulled it and pushed it and cut a notch in it and it didn’t fall on the house at all.

But the tree’s boyfriend caught it...

 like a Love story.

So we cut him down too.

And both of them fell right on the brush pile...

Like the end of a sad sad Love story.
But I didn't cry
because Lumberjacks don't do that kind of thing...
around other Lumberjacks anyway. 

And today...

(if I’m lucky),

(which I most always am)

I’ll get to have oilless deep fried turkey.

Which might be a Love story for someone.

The End.

oh... and I caught a baby bat.

Thanks to Axelle Red... and Stephanie

A

Doggers and I are going to become Gypsy Kings and wear leather breeches and hoop earrings.

 

We’re going to build a wagon with shingles and a smoke stack and a honeybee, and hook it to a mule named Marcus Aurelius and travel from one end of the farm to the other...then back.

 

We’re going to camp out under full moons, new moons, blue moons and harvest moons.

 

We’re going to build bonfires and play mandolins with curly headstocks, and sing and dance like dust devils.

 

We’re going to make two Gypsy Queens out of smoke and starshine, and the four of us will see more of the World than has ever been seen.

 

We’re going to eat nothing but yogurt and raisins and peaches all year, and honey from bees in a tree.

 

We’ll laugh and we’ll stomp and we’ll never come home because home is right where we’ll be.

But not Delmar.

Delmar licked the butter.

French Toast, Shed, Shingles, Laps

This morning we had French Toast.

I did anyway.

Doggers had French Dog Feed.

It was cold out.

Delmar came in. 

But he licked the butter.

Anyway...

Here is the sawmill shed now...

I have been double dirty dog dared to put shingles on the roof...

as opposed to steel.

No, not asphalt...

Wood shingles.

Oak.

That I rive.

By hand.

Looks like I need to slap together a shave horse.   

Speaking of double and dirty...

You can't sit down for a minute around here...

Without everbody climbing into your lap.

Ha!

Mines not big enough.