Be There Now
Scantily clad like a Southerner in a snowstorm and with only my recently acquired Yankee/Canadian merit badge to justify me being in a truck, in the snow, going nowhere, on highway 211, I started fishtailing about forty degrees worth on a straightaway.
I'm cooler than cool though, that's right, ice cold, so I just relaxed and let the truck find its direction, which luckily was straight ahead on down the road. My heart though was palpitating at not so much an alarming rate but enough to make me dizzy with cautious glee. The words to the beat were--I'm not in a ditch, I'm not in a ditch, I'm not in a ditch.
I hated the idea of being stuck up here; I don't get stuck is a thing I lie to myself about all the time.
So I jumped in the truck and headed down the snowy hill which is the easy part. I drove the five or six miles to Sperryville but forget about it, I wasn't having any of that delicious coffee at Rae's this morning, everybody stayed in bed, the parking lot is not even plowed. I headed back to Litttle Washington thinking I'll eat at the diner across from the famous Inn. But dammit those people rest on the Lord's day. That's when I started fishtailing on a straightaway, and I didn't really need coffee after that.
My friend and master of the manor had come out the day before while I was high as a kite and freezing cold up on the new 28 foot aluminum extension ladder I had just bought for the farm. I was cleaning out the gutters, fingertips throbbing and numb, fingernails packed tight with frozen black sludge. I was chipping it out of the gutter with a putty knife, four or five inch sections at a time, trying not to shred my bare knuckles against the metal edges of the gutter, or the metal edges of the roof. It was like a cross between that Milton Bradley game, Operation, and that game we played in the elementary school yard, bloody knuckles.
"I came to take you to lunch," he told me, giving me the once over.
I settled on having him bring me something back, which he did, enough for a couple of days in case I got snowed in. I don't have to tell you he's a nice guy, he just is.
But the next day, yesterday, back from my unsuccessful feeding mission, I could not make it up the driveway again. Fresh snow I thought would not present a challenge, and I had put the weighted buckets in the back of my truck bed the night before. So I walked back up the hill for the cat litter. I fell down once, like Lee Marvin in the final scene of (Ernest Hemingway's) The Killers (which by the way did not have a single word of Hemingway in it, not that it suffered from that.)
Unlike Lee Marvin, I got up again, got in the truck and tried backing down and up the hill a few times to spare using the last of Herman's cat litter. I was successful at this.
In the end, truck back at the top of the hill, I had some kind of green vegetarian roll up for breakfast, instead of the lasagna.
This is my last week here, until Spring, or until after the opening of New Orleans crawfish season at least, and I have a fair amount of work to do, and I'm getting a cold, I think. I don't remember when I last had a cold and I'm unsure about what to do, although sleeping is good so I did some extra sleeping yesterday, in between reading, and watching the excellent, Red, from Kieslowski, and the less challenging but enjoyable, Lilo and Stitch.
Now, tomorrow is supposed to be beautiful, and, with or without a cold, I can't see how I'm going to resist going back up into the Shenandoah one more time, so, I had better get to work, now.
there isnt any hemingway here, either.
I love Thurber.
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Scantily clad like a Southerner in a snowstorm and with only my recently acquired Yankee/Canadian merit badge to justify me being in a truck, in the snow, going nowhere, on highway 211, I started fishtailing about forty degrees worth on a straightaway.
I'm cooler than cool though, that's right, ice cold, so I just relaxed and let the truck find its direction, which luckily was straight ahead on down the road. My heart though was palpitating at not so much an alarming rate but enough to make me dizzy with cautious glee. The words to the beat were--I'm not in a ditch, I'm not in a ditch, I'm not in a ditch.
I hated the idea of being stuck up here; I don't get stuck is a thing I lie to myself about all the time.
So I jumped in the truck and headed down the snowy hill which is the easy part. I drove the five or six miles to Sperryville but forget about it, I wasn't having any of that delicious coffee at Rae's this morning, everybody stayed in bed, the parking lot is not even plowed. I headed back to Litttle Washington thinking I'll eat at the diner across from the famous Inn. But dammit those people rest on the Lord's day. That's when I started fishtailing on a straightaway, and I didn't really need coffee after that.
My friend and master of the manor had come out the day before while I was high as a kite and freezing cold up on the new 28 foot aluminum extension ladder I had just bought for the farm. I was cleaning out the gutters, fingertips throbbing and numb, fingernails packed tight with frozen black sludge. I was chipping it out of the gutter with a putty knife, four or five inch sections at a time, trying not to shred my bare knuckles against the metal edges of the gutter, or the metal edges of the roof. It was like a cross between that Milton Bradley game, Operation, and that game we played in the elementary school yard, bloody knuckles.
"I came to take you to lunch," he told me, giving me the once over.
I settled on having him bring me something back, which he did, enough for a couple of days in case I got snowed in. I don't have to tell you he's a nice guy, he just is.
But the next day, yesterday, back from my unsuccessful feeding mission, I could not make it up the driveway again. Fresh snow I thought would not present a challenge, and I had put the weighted buckets in the back of my truck bed the night before. So I walked back up the hill for the cat litter. I fell down once, like Lee Marvin in the final scene of (Ernest Hemingway's) The Killers (which by the way did not have a single word of Hemingway in it, not that it suffered from that.)
Unlike Lee Marvin, I got up again, got in the truck and tried backing down and up the hill a few times to spare using the last of Herman's cat litter. I was successful at this.
In the end, truck back at the top of the hill, I had some kind of green vegetarian roll up for breakfast, instead of the lasagna.
This is my last week here, until Spring, or until after the opening of New Orleans crawfish season at least, and I have a fair amount of work to do, and I'm getting a cold, I think. I don't remember when I last had a cold and I'm unsure about what to do, although sleeping is good so I did some extra sleeping yesterday, in between reading, and watching the excellent, Red, from Kieslowski, and the less challenging but enjoyable, Lilo and Stitch.
Now, tomorrow is supposed to be beautiful, and, with or without a cold, I can't see how I'm going to resist going back up into the Shenandoah one more time, so, I had better get to work, now.
- jimlouis 12-15-2003 3:24 pm
there isnt any hemingway here, either.
- dave 12-15-2003 4:27 pm [add a comment]
I love Thurber.
- jimlouis 12-15-2003 5:24 pm [add a comment]