Monday, December 15, 1997
Full moon hanging in the western sky this morning; full sun above the horizon in the east. The sky is powder blue between them, fresh and fragile as young love. A blanket of snow in the fields is not deep enough to hide the rubble of corn stalks. The day is pretty enough to take your breath away - but not so cold that it will.
In the evening, a discussion on NPR - "It's not what's in the story that matters; it's what's not in the story."

Tuesday, December 16, 1997
Almost spring this morning - crisp and bright, but mild too. The feel of a day at the end of winter, instead of at the beginning; after the worst. Moist enough to give us hope that winter won't be long.

At Five Corners, the borders of flowers - well cared for in season by a man who loves them - are covered with snow.

How many thoughts will I have that sound like I'm forced to think them? The question is: can a man who considers himself a good writer write one good sentence a day?

Wednesday, December 17, 1997
In some places, snow fills the ditches. In some places, the fields are bare; in others, snow follows the curve of furrow. At the Sina farm with the yellow barn, I smell pigs. In the west, clouds are tinged pink by the rising sun.

Thursday, December 18, 1997
There is a thin veil of fog this morning. It blurs the trees of a woods in the distance. The land rolls away into it. There is a softness to the sky, to the sun, as if the day is someone's watercolor, painted now, painted for me.

Friday, December 19, 1997
I was up much of the night with pain. This morning, the road is not eager. The land has that lonesome, forlorn look that tugs at me. At the grain bin where corn has been drying, the ground is stained red with corn dust, like blood, spewed. Thank God it's Friday.

Monday, December 22, 1997
What is the draw of the naked land - the plowed furrows, the shredded corn stalks, the dry grass, the brown weeds in fence rows? Looking into the eyes of the child I was that first day of school, long ago, in Iowa, I see the same sense of a lonely land. The swells of earth roll away from me like a pretty woman who needs a bath. I am alone here, now.

Tuesday, December 23, 1997
We lay our section and grid lines incessantly on the land. We fence it in. We cut down trees and we plant them. Our plows open the skin of earth and expose the soil to wind and water erosion. We dam the rivers. We drain the lakes. We farm our marshes. We put houses here, houses there. Our roads cut through hill, fill the dale. Power lines and telephone poles compose the view for us. Our feet tramp paths hard as concrete. We change the weather with our black fields retaining the heat of a weak spring sun. We pollute the water. Wild game becomes scarce. We plant exotics, which drive out our native species.

How the land affects us: Think of Ed Tonn. How he enjoyed his time spent in the woods with fern and flower, his trip up the Wolf River camping out with two other boys. After his death, his daughter reported he had a life-long love of the natural world.

Wednesday, December 24, 1997
I want to think today about winter solstice, but cannot hold the idea. I am subject to my rituals. I do know that the length of day - by that I mean the length of daylight - has become increasingly important to me over the years - especially now that I am living a "day shift" schedule. To rise in the dark and drive to work sometimes in the dark or in near darkness, to drive home after the sun is entirely set and dusk is gone - these are like a cage around me, locking me into darkness. The solstice is like a reprieve, like a promise that the days will grow longer, the light will return. The light that has most tugged me over the years, I know, is the long, low lay of autumn light. But the light returning, promised by the winter solstice, is the second season of light for me. Is it no wonder ancient peoples yoked the return of light to the birth of a great hero or savior. The sun returning is the Son coming, perhaps?

Monday, December 29, 1997
Part of what attracts us to the land is its capacity to support us. We believe we can make a living there. A farmer settles where he can farm successfully (or thinks he can, e.g. eastern Montana in the early twentieth century). What attracts us to an area sometimes is not what keeps us. In our own case, the attractions were: it was near the farm, near a job for Mary, and had a house we could afford. What keeps us now: my job, a sense of rootedness, of belonging, an investment of ourselves in this place.

Tuesday, December 30, 1997
These mornings, frost on the windshield - as if to map the day. If my drive to work is a good one, my day will be a good one. If I am clear and thoughtful driving in, I will be productive.

We fear the worst we have seen - the coldest weather, three weeks of 20 below, 30 below zero; the deepest snow, enough to bury a car on the roadway. We have seen none of these yet and it is the end of December. The days grow longer.

I have my rituals on the drive to work - the blue Bronco heading south - where is he? He is late. During the school year, a crossing guard on Watson Street in Ripon - a different one every year. This year, an older woman who stops traffic more often than those of the past, who seems to talk with the children more.

Wednesday, December 31, 1997
Cold, this morning - the coldest day of the season. Enough snow last night that I had a small plowbank to scoop today. In the east, a bank of dark clouds receding over Lake Michigan. Upstate New York, I hear, is getting hammered. Overhead, a scattered smattering of clouds. It will be bright today.

You want opinion? Here's one. There's too many goddamn people in the world. There is no reason for all these houses going up on good farm land. As pestilence follows stupidity, disease and violence will reduce our number to a size the earth can support. How much damage will we do first?

In the plowed field just to the north of the abandoned farmstead where lives the hawk, a lone, large oak. It has been there a long time. Many crops have grown in its shadow. Why is it there still? Is it a sentinel against man's stupidities? A futile gesture, like a raised middle finger?

Friday, January 2, 1998
If a year follows its beginning, 1998 will be a good one. Mild yesterday and this morning. Light in the east today is golden, liquid. The road is moist.

There are several lone trees in the midst of fields - all of them on the same half section. Is this one farmer's statement? I should circle that half section and look more closely. What is this fellow saying?

Monday, January 5, 1998
A warm weekend behind us - enough that the fields are bare of snow. A thin layer of sleet on things Sunday morning, heavy rain Sunday evening. This morning, a curtain of fog hangs less than a quarter mile distant. Roads are slippery enough that schools have cancelled classes or delayed them two hours. The roads are slippery enough for me to ask myself why I am heading in to work at the usual time. Why not delay two hours? My heart won't let me - I go in because I have to go in, which speaks not about the place I work, but about me.

Tuesday, January 6, 1998
Such a day as today leads us to think about power - or rather, powerlessness. If I have said it was slippery in the past, I was exaggerating. Today is slippery. I stand at the crest of the driveway and - without effort on my part - slide to the bottom.

The roads outside town are wet, not icy. Beards of ice cling to fences and electrical wires, however; some of the power lines are sagging with the weight. Again today a curtain of fog a quarter mile distant, the moisture coalescing into ice this morning. In Ripon, the parking lot at Grace Lutheran Church looks like a skating rink.

If it is true that we are defined by that which we are a part of, what am I this morning?

Wednesday, January 7, 1998
Cloudy and brisk. As dark a morning as I have seen this season. Along the roadside, flashes of ice. Here and there the highway is slippery. The fine branches of the trees are heavy more with a thin layer of ice, I think, than with hoar frost. The day has a gloamy November cast to it. It does not belong in January.

Is it not true that we define what we are part of as much as it defines us? What have I made of things today?

Thursday, January 8, 1998
Power and powerlessness. We were supposed to have snow last night - 3"-6". It has not come, but is promised for today. We are powerless against the weather and we know it; but even so the land - which seems eternal - does not remain immutable. Mountains rise and fall. These swells, here, come and they will go. The scale is longer than man's life, is longer than humanity's existence. The forest outlives the tree, humanity outlives the individual - but none of it is permanent. Twenty five billion years from now, when the sun collapses back on itself, where will it all be? The earth will be a cinder speck in the eye of God.

In such a frame of mind, I go to work this morning.

Friday, January 9, 1998
No work today - I have vacation and soon will be driving to Iowa to visit my parents. The snow promised yesterday arrived. We were on the edge of the storm and got only three inches. The worst of it was northeast, east, and southeast of here, from the Gulf to Labrador. Hundreds of thousands of people without power due to ice. People in North Carolina and Tennessee and elsewhere in the south have drowned in heavy floods. Somewhere, somehow, 16" of rain fell in twenty four hours. We are powerless.

Yet, even so, in the pioneer spirit of our forefathers, we proceed otherwise. We forge ahead, as if we have a measure of control over the universe. If we believed otherwise, we'd die by our own hand, wouldn't we? We can't go on, beating our heads against futility.

Monday, January 12, 1998
Cold has moved in. "Cold," says the man with the short memory. It did not get below zero. In fact, this morning it feels downright balmy - in the teens perhaps.

Driving north - in many places the ditches are full with snow. In some places, the wind chiseled banks are dark with soil. It is not snow only the wind has picked up from the fields and dropped into the ditches. In some places, the fields are swept smooth and clean as a kitchen floor. The earth repairs itself, but more slowly than we can comprehend sometimes.

Tuesday, January 13, 1998
An earlier start than usual - not desire but need. I will need to leave work early today.
The moon is a bullet hole in the western sky this morning.

It is a cold morning - in the single digits below zero. Cold enough for the snow to talk. Snow says: "You're fools! You're all fools!" My old pick-up talks, says: 'DOOON'T DOOO THIS TOOO MEEE."

Driving north out of Fairwater, I look east. The trees along the Grand River are a dark, tattered lace. To the northwest, soon, I see fog billowing above Green Lake, which is still open. The fog rises, breaks into clouds which drift away.

The highway is "snow-covered and slippery," as they say. These days all rush away like they don't enjoy our company. I long for a languid evening, a lazy sun setting in the western sky, I mean LAZY, an electric buzz to the warm air, a cool drink. Dream on, farm boy....

Wednesday, January 14, 1998
Warmer this morning - above zero. Plows have pushed the snow banks as far back from the road as possible. The wind is lifting soil from the expanse of raw fields again, depositing it everywhere on snow that was white yesterday.

I pass that pole building again this morning. No one knows that I hate it, no one knows how much - not the farmer who bought it, not the workmen who built it, not the farm hands who load seed and fertilizer out of it in season. It's just a pole building, sure, but it stands not thirty feet from the power pole where perched the snowy owl a few years ago. That owl had stayed a week then. I have hoped that it would return, but now what chance? Why perch so near a festering, maggot-infested, pus-oozing, putrid sore on the landscape. Or do I speak too harshly? Why should the owl return?

Strange, this relationship with that building - a hidden tie I have to a feature on the landscape. I wonder - if we could map them - what web of relationships exist between the land and all who pass here. What web of relationships amongst the people themselves, passing here.

Thursday, January 15, 1998
It snowed again yesterday in the afternoon, heavily. The fields are white, the ditches full. Whiteness stretches away endless in front of me. Sometimes I think the land is lonely and eternal, like the sound of one hand clapping.
This morning the trees look like claws. Sometimes they look like hands giving, or open to receive. Sometimes they look like trees.

I notice the attic window now, formed in the shape of a cross. That work was done last summer. I am a slow boy. This is at the Sina place where the stink of pigs hangs heavy.

This road itself is one strand in a web, one thread of a greater network. We can speak of the interrelations which exist within the confines of this stretch of road, but one must also consider the greater expanse of connections. The possibilities reverberate, echoes of a pattern deeply established across the land, across cultures too, perhaps.

Friday, January 16, 1998
Two children run carelessly towards the end of the driveway at the Sina pig farm. They live in the rented house. There is a 3-sided shelter at the end of the drive to protect them while waiting for the bus, but they won't need it today.

The weather has warmed. The shelter has a large plastic window; the children can watch the road in the direction from which the bus comes.

Do the school children riding that bus know these are the best days of their lives? Or do they - as I did - believe they were born free but so soon get locked into a meaningless dance of school ritual. Education. We don't know savage ignorance perhaps, but neither do we know savage joy.

I slept poorly last night. This road seems to run uphill in both directions. The sky is heavy, a dirty, wet dishrag that needs to have the water wrung out of it.

Monday, January 19, 1998
The road is straight and true, heading north. It is a section line, the last before the western edge of the county one mile to the west. It is laid straight and true on the land - does not follow any animal trail that became a wagon path and thus is not grounded in the landscape. It is built up where the ground is low, where the ground stays wet in spring and through much of the summer. Animals would have made a path that danced this way and that, following the land's desires by instinct, leaving a marvelous scribble. No, instead we have the shortest distance between two points. Perhaps.

Tuesday, January 20, 1998
It is not gin and tonic weather yet this morning, but it is mild. Patches of blue sky here and there. Close to the ground there is hoarfrost - on weeds and brush. It is low on the trees - in a grove, the bottom 10 feet of trunk and branches will be whitewashed evenly with the hoarfrost; above that, nothing. An unusual look at the trees - above and below, almost as if they were sticking their crowns through clouds.

At the "abandoned" farm where lives the hawk, a special tug as I pass. The barn points east and west, with an opening to the hay mow at either end. A ceramic block building is also oriented east to west; it could have been a chicken coop. Another small barn or great machine shed sits nested to the trees. It's spirit has been broken; it is falling back to the land. The farm is not abandoned. There is an ice shack stored there, an old car, other cast-offs of modern life. There are pine trees and oaks to shelter the place. The house is gone. I wonder where sat it? The farmer and his family are gone. I wonder where, and why?

Wednesday, January 21, 1998
It snowed during the late night hours - an inch or two since 3:00 a.m. It has not been so much as to bring out the snow plows, but enough to make the roads slippery.

I backed down our driveway and slid into the snow pile at one side of the end of it. No - to be truthful - I backed solidly into it, confident I was okay, for the lack of shadow and definition meant I couldn't distinguish in the rearview mirror what was snowbank and what was air with snow behind it. I had to dig my way out and am later than usual this morning.

In road conditions like these, I think of all the talk of cyber space and telecommuting. Bah! It is a ten mile drive for me, to work. On a clear, dry day, it is uneventful. Such days as today remind me that it was not so long ago that buggies were put away in favor of sleighs in the winter. Reminds me that Adelbert Bly got his horse stuck in a snow drift on his way to Green Lake to visit his sweetheart; had to dig the horse free and turn back. Reminds me that even though we can go 'round the world in 2/5th of a second electronically, here in "meat space" the task is still a physical one.

Transportation has made great strides, yes, wonderful strides. My grandfather would not have lived in Fairwater and worked in Ripon. Yet we have not advanced beyond our physical nature. Our travel to and from work still takes time, "meat time."

Thursday, January 22, 1998
The heavy snow that had been expected did not arrive. We got a couple inches only - enough to drift on the road and slow us down this morning, not enough to paralyze us.

We must remember that the weather forecasts are not prescient predictions, but informed guesses based on the best data available to the weatherman. This is true in all areas of life.

I stop at the 4-way stop on Blackburn Street in Ripon. That car - I've seen it before. It's going to turn south on Highway 49 behind me. It does. That blue truck - I saw it again this morning, I expected to see it. I see it most other days when I travel at this hour.

We discern patterns and we can be confident that if the pattern holds certain things will happen. Disruption occurs, of course. That's my "Snapping Dog" theory. Just when you think you have it all figured out, just when it looks like everything fits, an unhappy dog with teeth comes out of nowhere and bites you on the ass.

Standing here - on Highway E between Fairwater and Ripon - 30,000 years ago, could I have ever predicted this road would be set down here straight and true? No. The factors which gave rise to the road are relatively recent in a 30,000 year time frame. They are the snapping dogs. This happens again and again in our lives. "There but for a Snapping Dog go I."

Friday, January 23, 1998
It snowed again last night. The land is white this morning except where grasses push up through the snow, and weeds, and corn stalks.

The land rolls away with a lilt, sings its winter tenor. I am an Iowa farm boy again, a mere child, picturing Wisconsin. It looks like this. It looks exactly like this. Always the roll to the land, something our Iowa fields didn't have. Always with woods. Always with a layer of snow, this kind of light laying on it, the air suffused with it.

I have come to a psychic, mythic landscape that resonates with me. I have come home.

Monday, January 26, 1998
Snow.
It has been snowing.
It snowed.
It has snowed.
It snows.
It will snow.
It will have been snowing.
It will have been being snow - in the air, like fog embracing the trees. These farmsteads come in a dream haze, like castles in Camelot, the silos as towers.
It is January.
This is Wisconsin.
Suck it up.

Tuesday, January 27, 1998
I can choose silence, here.

I can turn off the radio and the raucous problems of the world and find peace for a few minutes, driving this road to work. At some point, perhaps, those in Appleton and Green Bay, in Milwaukee and Chicago, could do the same; but now - not so easily. They wake to loud music, obnoxious disc jockeys. They drive in noisy traffic - what do they call it, that slightly mobile traffic jam they seem to spend half their lives in?

I wake to ghosts speaking. I can choose to listen to the dead. Driving to work, I can listen for whispers in the homes along the way - imagined lives of real neighbors.

This morning the clouds are so low they kiss the snow. I can see that, here, be part of it. I don't feel the need to yell, to shake my fist at some idiot who has cut me off in heavy traffic.

My heavy traffic is meditation - is one quiet thought. Is this peacefulness. This peaceableness.

Wednesday, January 28, 1998
The fog is like a dome around me - the grey walls front and back, to the side, above. It doesn't matter today!

I received news last night one of my poems was selected for inclusion in the architecture of the new convention center in Milwaukee - carved in stone or etched in glass or cast in bronze. I am with the Sun, now, at the center of the solar system; I am at the heart of the universe. It is a moment of great personal joy and I cannot think other thoughts this morning.
Except to wonder at the weight of it: how heavy the burden on the writer who would be read into the future. How great the responsibility to see the truth, and to tell it. How much there is to tell, and how shabby my tools. A thought that will last - that is a heady responsibility. I must bring humility to my daily drive, to my meditations on this ten mile stretch of road.

Thursday, January 29, 1998
I spent time this morning clearing my windshield. A layer of ice had thickened on it, then a layer of snow. I had to use the toothy side of the scraper, with muscle behind it. The road had crusty, rotten ice and was not slippery.

Grace is a gift. The earth gives us moisture and we complain because it comes in the form of snow, or ice. It nourishes us but we think it is not good enough. Man is the whiny animal, the one who complains the most with the least provocation. Does the rabbit worry this morning, or the squirrel? Do the birds of the air?

Some mornings it becomes so clear how much we ought to give up our notion of how things should be and simply let them be. We would find more peace. Certainly our nattering doesn't change things one bit. Mother Earth in her ageless wisdom cannot concern herself with my individual joy, my sorrow. The cycle of life turns - be happy that I am part of it; be humble in the presence of such a season, the turn of the day, the month, the year. Like every other day, Ben says, this day is like no other!

Friday, January 30, 1998
This morning, the blackness of crow against the crusted whiteness of snow. A study in contrast.

It is not features on the landscape I am looking for. The features themselves are not even the defining characteristic making the place what it is. It is the web of relationships across the landscape that interests me. These relationships are largely hidden from cursory examination, but they are there, part of the inexorable march of principle in nature. I am thinking of the relationships between wind and sky and soil, between animal and plant, plant and plant, animal and animal, between earth and sky, silence and sound, light and darkness, between man and man and woman, between man and machine and geology, between time and eternity. The relationships here are as real as the veins on the back of my hand, but much harder to see. They are an entanglement of dreams and dreamers: a snarled, matted mass that is now, is here, is this. Can I ever separate the threads? Do I really want to?

Where County E and Radio Road meet at the south edge of Ripon, I can see that two large, old trees are being taken apart. The branches are a mess of brush and firewood now; only the massive trunks remain. An acorn's dream has ended.

Monday, February 2, 1998
Sleet last night, and snow. Power poles and trees are plastered white on the south side, top to bottom. The telephone poles look like poplars. Blue sky is blowing in from the west. The prairie this morning looks like tundra, hard-edged with a blue cast.

A new day, a new week, a new month. The book of possibilities opens. What do we read? We are survivors. January is done. I must disagree with Eliot: at least here in Wisconsin, January is the cruelest month. We slipped by easy this year - El Nino, they say. One cold night only. The day's lengthen - it is February now. How bad can it get, really?

We are survivors. We put on our skins and furs and we hunker down when we have to. The change of seasons, the blue light of winter, the crust of ice thick on the road this morning - these are good for a man's soul. You want palm trees, you want soft warm breezes year 'round, your soul then would rot like fruit left too long in the sun. It is ice that puts spine in a man's back, ice and cold and snow. We complain only to have something to talk about.

Tuesday, February 3, 1998
"Hurry, squirrel," bushy-tailed to the wind. The cold this morning closes like ice water around naked fingers.

Morning. Morning is like a journey into unknown lands, a trek into wilderness. Go in so deep you can't come back. Go native. Forget why you've gone. Forget where you've come from.

Do these neighbors ride each day like a wild pony? Or do they prefer their days as a grey, undistinguished mass? You can't tell by looking. One or the other may surprise you.
Writing "I am late," I am late. Each day is an adventure.

Wednesday, February 4, 1998
Pain and darkness. Another night of pain and I am slow this morning, having tossed and turned. As sure as Pavlov's dogs salivate at the sound of the bell, I will - if this keeps up - associate pain with darkness. Leave me alone. Why after 50 years of serving me well does my belly bellyache?

I passed the C&D Bar as I left home this morning - as I do every morning. I am fortunate - my favorite fish fry in all of the world - which is to say Wisconsin - is three doors up the street from me. It is a plain building; it is a plain meal in a plain setting, the fish fry there, until you taste it. Like other events in small towns, it is more than it pretends to be. It is a community gathering, a kind of Mass and breaking of the bread. Like the Corn & Brat Roast every August, it resonates with the spirit of those who work it and those who show up to enjoy.

This morning is little more than a repeat of yesterday, if you look at the cloud of sky and snow of land and slap of tree. To say nothing, perhaps, of the caw of crow. Crows must have nowhere to hide in this season - they are so obvious.

Some days you set out to study rocks and the next thing you know you are running an organization. I don't want to let that happen to me. A writer's job is to write, not to lead. I will serve when it doesn't get in the way of writing.

Thursday, February 5, 1998
The north-bound lane of County E heading out of Fairwater is humped - moreso than the other lane. Sand trucks from Badger Mining a few miles to the west come through here, loaded heavy with sand for foundries in Green Bay and Oshkosh. Coming back empty, they do not strain the road.

My friend quotes the old saying: a rooster pheasant can find cover on a pool table. I wonder about them finding cover in the shabby remains of our fence rows, here where we grow cash crops - sweet corn, peas, green beans; here where few run any livestock and there is no need for fences except to mark my ground from yours. In many fields, fence rows are mere shadow and smoke. Cock pheasants must find cover on the flat whiteness of the winter fields.

We keep our trees here, though. Every field seems to have a few - along drainage ditches and property lines, marking the creeks, marking the headwaters of the Grand River just east of here. Many of the trees, obviously, seeded by birds, God love 'em.

This morning has the cast to it, again, that the Iowa farm boy dreaming Wisconsin always dreams. The day is grey but luminous, somehow; a grey that can dance, invigorated and promising.

Never speak of having nothing to say. Speak of the weather instead - mild, with a slight breeze; this morning is smooth, like a fine, smoky whiskey. A day can just as easily turn harsh like the cheap hooch.

Sometimes here we wave to each in other passing by accident, out of reflex, or from some ancient habit. We do not want to be seen as unfriendly; we want to be seen as good neighbors. And sometimes here we wave to each other in passing because we want to.

Friday, February 6, 1998
It is not spring this morning - it is much too cold. But the day is bright, the sky is blue, the birds are singing Lauds to the rising sun. I feel their animal joy. All those of us who die today will ascend straight to heaven. That's the kind of day it is.

North of Fairwater, lasting no more than the first couple miles, there is scattered fog about eight feet above the ground. Some of it is thick and slow like a lazy dog. Some is flat and sharp, like a knife, like a bracket fungus above the land.

Overhead, jets have already scratched the morning sky. Oh, people! You cannot stay too much to home!

At the edge of Ripon, at the "new" house on what used to be the church's lawn, a dog's leash is the radius of a near perfect circle tramped in snow. In light like this I could covet houses on Watson Street, and I don't usually envy anyone. Today is not a book, but you can make a book of it. Be careful, though. This beauty is delicate, Tom, and you are ham-fisted, sometimes.

Monday, February 9, 1998
Hoarfrost as heavy as I think I've seen. No, let me be clear: I have never seen it heavier. A thick fog the color of hoarfrost all the way to Ripon. Beauty has two charms - one: it is constant, eternal; two: it is changing and mercurial. That is the contradiction each day, facing the world - it is the same, always; and it is different.

Death on its errand is sometimes a friend, sometimes an enemy. The big pines this morning, weighted and white, beg release. Those glowing cat eyes are headlights of a truck heading south. It is a long, slow way to work today. Apparitions materialize out of the fog. Or is the fog the apparition, an insistent ghost? Visibility is twenty yards or less.

I have the certainty of solid earth. Do not ask for much and you will get everything you should have. I carry what I need. I have only a few ideas, but I steer a course straight and true - on through this fog, on through the day.

Tuesday, February 10, 1998
The road is neutral, isn't it? It takes us either to, or from. It brings us both holy man and thief.

We are what we are when we start - we cannot change that. Though - by careful attention and effort - we may change and be changed along the path.

The figures the wind makes in the snow - delicate works of art. What do they teach me? The fog yesterday, morning and evening, and the day before. What does it teach? The cold?

What you run from, why, you run into its arms.
Hoarfrost - still, or again. The trees are white brushes sweeping the sky. The pines still beg for mercy. In such beauty, you can believe anything. How can you stay the same when everything changes. Some things we dare not think of, or we lose them.

We are all holy today, now. I hold my breath, afraid to crack the moment. All roads lead me here, or none do.

Wednesday, February 11, 1998
Wetness, this morning. Hanging in the air. A damp road.

Wednesday is garbage pick-up day in Fairwater. The cans stand like soldiers.
A woman in a red coat with a hood is out for a walk, and her dog with her. She is my mother-in-law. The dog is dumb as a box of rocks. Sweet, though.

In the country, a dome of fog again, the walls a quarter mile distant. There is no line of horizon. I have no perception of difference where snow meets the air. Sometimes we live our lives in fog like this - with no recognition that there is a sun somewhere above, shining, steady.

Instead of seeing the world as it is, we make argument about nothing.

How can we know anything if we don't know everything?

How can I have one friend when I don't love all humankind.

Whoo boy! Now you're going too far. Keep the wheels on the bottom, Tom.

Thursday, February 12, 1998
Neighbor implies proximity, that we are close to one another physically. Neighbor might also mean friendship, but often does not - for proximity by itself is scant basis for intimacy. Indeed, friendship thrives beyond nearness.
Neighborliness, then, is a set of rules, an etiquette, an unspoken agreement to treat each other in certain ways. Neighborliness changes from region to region, I expect. What is acceptable here, asking how big your farm is or how many head of cattle you run, is not acceptable in South Dakota. I would not tell you, for instance, that my neighbor's windows are dirty - that I can see smears on the windows with light coming all the way across the house from windows on the other side. And my neighbor would not tell you I have a cat sitting in my window again this morning, its nose against the glass, the moisture of its breath leaving its own smear after it hops down, along with yesterday's, last week's, last month's.

Call it Blue Sky, Wisconsin, this village, this morning. In the light, the snow is pale blue, the shadows a deeper cast. Far to the southwest, a bank of clouds. More clouds in the east - along Lake Michigan, I assume. The land is flat; snow is crusted on the fields. Still it feels like morning in McBride, British Columbia, nested along the Canadian Rockies.

I should mention this: between the south edge of Ripon and Five Corners, someone has driven through the ditch and across a field to reach one of those new homes - through deep snow. There is a perfectly good driveway but twenty or thirty yards away. I suppose it looked like a good idea at the time. The tires have made terrible scars through the snow.

Never ask whose day it is; it might be yours.
In Ripon, on Watson Street, in the light, icicles are hanging from the eaves of some beautiful houses - Lucies in the sky!

Friday, February 13, 1998
Sometimes the road is rocky, sometimes the path is steep. If holiness were easy, we'd all be saints.

Flash of red in my driveway is a cardinal - happy bird!

The trees - their fingers of frost reaching for the sky.

Consider every gun loaded, every thought dangerous. This drive to work can be a wild cowboy's shoot 'em up right down the main street of town, the buildings still smelling of wood newly sawed. Where a woman steps back from the window, bites her bottom lip, frets. Where a boy dreams of mastery in a world that can never be. Where a lawman prepares to kill, or be killed. It's that kind of morning.

There is heavy fog in the country. A crow flies in it. I lose him: I can't shake him loose from it.
We are who we are but we are not always who we pretend to be.

Let loose what you hang onto so tightly: I find the crow again, in Ripon.

Monday, February 16, 1998
Winter is like a dream we've wakened from, a little disoriented but we're awake now and ready to go. It is warm and moist this morning - April, not February. Water drips everywhere.

The sun is more than light today, is warmth too. The plow banks in Fairwater have melted back from the curb.

Snow has melted out in the fields and the world looks a little unshaven. If you go away and stay too long, sometimes you can't come back - what you left isn't here when you return. You can get blood out of a turnip, but it is seldom worth the effort. If you look close enough, you'll see that the pretty girl is kind of flop-eared.

Tuesday, February 17, 1998
Water seeks its own level. The path leads where it will. If you cannot believe what the morning light reveals, move on.

The world is round, not flat. We know, because the surveyors had to shave thin, sometimes, the western sections of the township, the northern ones, to accommodate the shrinking distances. To cross the continent more quickly, I tell people, go to Canada where the world is not so wide. They don't, of course, believe me.

Another damp morning. Water standing, water moving. Unseasonably warm, they would say. El Nino, again they would say. Moisture is beaded on the windshield of the pick-up. A grey, damp viewpoint of a day. This morning, wood off the top of the pile would sizzle and sing on its way to flame.

In the country, the wind is bragging a bit. Huff and puff, I say, and blow away the greyness. Otherwise, Brother Wind, you are nothing but a lot of air.

Thick and thicker the grey gets, as I head north. Thin and thinner the layer of snow on the fields. Green and greener the promise of spring. The girls go home with who brung 'em.

On Watson Street in Ripon, I pass the house our friends used to live in. Their young daughter had been naughty. She's in college now - cripes! She had been naughty and was sent to her room. It was summer. The folks next door were having a party in their back yard. The grill was fired up. People were rattling the ice in their drinks, talking, waiting for burgers. The little girl stuck her head out of the window of her room: "Help me, neighbors," she shouted. "Get me out of here!"

Wednesday, February 18, 1998
How much different would it be: I step out the back door of my remote cabin into a canoe, enter the small stream quietly, head off to check my traps. The smell of smoke clings to my clothes, the stink hangs about me of one who lives close to the land. I have my rifle, ready for bear or deer, something for the larder for winter. I have my fish nets. How much different would it be, a morning like that compared to this? The path we choose chooses us.

It is wet again this morning. Though a bit of chill in the air, old chap. Much of our lawn is clear of snow. A child waiting for the bus kicks at a plow bank that remains.

Houses bloom like spring flowers behind the Village Mart. Most have been built by village residents. Well, it is their town.

We have had geese all winter. They are flying again today. A vee of them is blasted apart in front of me by the heavy wind.

The road seems especially rough lately, as if winter has been heaving it, pushing and shoving the way the season does.

At Five Corners, a flower bed still with three feet of snow piled up against the wind break behind it.

You do what you have to and some days that's enough. Some days whatever you do is not enough. Today I am later than usual. The streets seem empty.

Thursday, February 19, 1998
The great web is interconnected. Our season is the world's season. It may not be that the butterfly flapping its wings in the Central American jungle actually alters our weather here, but apparently warm water in the Pacific does. Some other time, it may be polar cold caught in the jet stream that changes our smiles to hard-faced shivering.

A grey mildness. Plow banks continue to shrink. There is an April dirtiness to the snow: all the reasons you might have to run away reveal themselves. A layer of mud at the edge of things.

Why does it look like snow in the distance to the west?

What snow remains in the furrowed fields accents the furrows; it lays between the rows of corn stalks. The snow retreats.

Here and there, a ditch, a lawn, a hayfield holds onto the idea of greenness. It is not such a preposterous thought this morning.

Where the dog had tramped a circle in the snow there is a circle in the grass. Some things are permanent. Some things are ugly to the bone.

Friday, February 20, 1998
Each day starts out virginal and fresh, a blushing girl. By the time we finish, she is a stinking whore. We are not very proud of what we have been doing.

Winter spit at us again last night - just a bit of sleet mixed with snow, making a bit of crust on the hood of the pick-up, even less on the windshield. The streets are clear, the edges of things dusted a little white in places. We cannot complain, though I'm sure some of us will. Winter licks us with a wet tongue.

How many ways can you say wet and grey? Grey the color of the old pick-up in front of me, turning onto Fairview Court in Fairwater.
On the fields, two tones of white: one like frozen milk, solid and opaque, where the old snow remains; the other like a thin film of gauze, stretched, transparent.

Geese are flying again, holding their course this morning.

Let go of it: sometimes we worry our way into trouble.

Just before Five Corners, the donkeys stand in the sere-colored pasture.

Where a car had scarred the snow driving off the road to the new house, the snow has melted. The earth is scarred too. When we skim the surface we also crease the soul.

There is nothing so pretty as another morning, grey or otherwise.

Monday, February 23, 1998
Where do we begin and end? It is spring coming on that marks the first of the new year - and if so, why don't we say so. The greening of the year is a beginning. Or do we really start at an artificial place - New Year's Day on the calendar? Perhaps as we get farther away from our agricultural roots, the artificiality of the New Year matters less. Farmers know when the new year really begins: when the soil warms enough for planting.

Over the weekend, the earth soaked up what sun we had. Photosynthesis has truly greened some fields. The calendar says "Heavy winter." The day says "Hello, spring." A little soft frost on grass and windshield doesn't change that. Snow remains only where it had been piled deep. In downtown Fairwater, the snowmobiles on the trailer parked across from the lumber yard look useless now. North of town there are great stretches of crop rubble and plowed furrow entirely exposed. Yesterday there was water running and it will run again today.

A big raccoon dead on the road - otherwise it is a beautiful day. The sun burns away a very distant, misty fog. It's the kind of day you'd want to put in your pocket and save for later - say when there's a March blizzard blowing in. The kind of day when the juice of another season wants to flow. "Don't," the school girl would say to her boyfriend. "Please don't."

Tuesday, February 24, 1998
What is work? Work is a transforming effort. When you are done, something has been changed and you were the agent of that change. A farmer takes soil and sun and seed and moisture and raises food for the world. A noble transformation. A bomber pilot changes a city's landscape. A miner sends ore on its way to the smelter. A printer - well, I guess a printer makes books. We make catalogs. It's a grey morning and I'm not sure printing catalogs is all that important in the entire scheme of things. It is a good company I work for, one that takes care of its people. But still we are printing and binding and mailing what some would call junk mail, what others might see as the actual grease of commerce. It is work - it pays me and for the most part I enjoy what I do.

This morning. This is not Wisconsin. It is much too grey and thick. The sky today has no magic. Everything beaded with moisture. The road is wet. Set down your air ship out of the greyness, you could be anywhere.

Yet even as I say that - my breath catches. The land rolling away - I belong to it. Where the hawk lives, I see the hawk find its perch. I almost taste it now, this morning, the musk of the earth enveloping me. If I had stayed in Iowa, would I have grown to love it so well? Would it have shaped me different? This place is as plain as the Iowa farmland I knew as a child, yet even in the day's greyness it now seems somehow more radiant. I will never be the same. Look at me now, a strange man, writing.

Wednesday, February 25, 1998
Traveling lets us see a landscape new to us, unfamiliar. We leave our home place for another, different, new land; other, different people. As a result, we see with new eyes. We could "travel" through our home country could we but learn to see with new eyes. The same ol' same ol' piles up, though, and soon enough we don't even notice the most spectacular beauty just outside our doors. I want to travel my home country, to see it every day freshly, not to let the familiar blind me to the beautiful right here, right now.

Perhaps it is our comfort which makes us blind. We know there are few dangers here - we don't have to watch so carefully. We are so familiar with our routes that when asked to give directions we realize we don't know the names of streets we drive every day. Instead we start to describe the landmarks we have been using unconsciously to guide us. It is a shock to recognize we are so blind among the familiar.

Frost scraped off the windshield flies away like sheets flapping on the line. Sun and shadow this morning. Blue sky and cloud. A smooth surface on the mirror. I can see clearly.

Another house is going up behind the Village Mart in Fairwater. Another For Sale sign on an old house in town.

Another dead coon on the road this morning. Six Canadian geese, flying, look almost long-necked enough to be cranes but their white butts give them away. There is snow in the ditches still and along fencelines - otherwise, only a thin layer of frost on the fields. It will be gone soon, the frost.

How different would the world look were I a child? How different were I am old man, truly?

The very ground wants to explode with meaning. "Honest, Officer, I was not paying attention when it erupted, so I didn't see it happen. Then when I noticed it, it didn't seem like such a big deal so I didn't call anyone."

Thursday, February 26, 1998
I don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. I don't watch the weather on TV as a rule. I don't call Time & Temp. What is "going" to happen doesn't interest me. I want to see what's here, what's now. This grey sky. Let someone else worry about predicting the "El Nino event" nine to twelve months in advance. Today's greyness is good enough for me.

Today's spit of rain, the March bluster of this February wind. It is, by God, it is almost spring. What comes to pass is never so bad as what we imagine beforehand.

A Fairwater dog defecates in a yard along Washington Street: an emblem this morning of the cycle of things, the dance of earth and water and sky, of matter and energy. What will be is being created out of what was.

I turn into the driveway at work. Another day and then another. It is raining harder now. Lead us not into temptation.

Friday, February 27, 1998
Wet and windy and wild. Grey. Gray. Greau. The wind has behind it the rhythm of great, rumbling kettle drums; the percussion section in the orchestra is out of control. This is not February, no matter what the calendar says.

At the end of my driveway, a small branch is down. There is enough rain on the windshield to create a stippled, impressionistic landscape. Even the grass in the Fairwater cemetery wants to be green. Only blocky patches of snow remain in the ditches along the road. Two geese fight the wind, the heavy wind and drizzle.

One a scale of One to Ten, what kind of day is it? Let me say there is another dead raccoon this morning. Let me say there are soda containers and hamburger wrappers and all manner of what else bare naked and revealed in the ditches along the way. The wind wants to blow the truck about - and I don't care too much one way or the other. The rain gets heavier as I head north.

Today it's like closing time in a bar and I've had a few beers and this morning is the only girl who hasn't said she's going home with someone else. What are you going to do? You take what you get, sometimes.

Monday, March 2, 1998
The five robins we saw in the country on Saturday must be surprised by the snow on the ground this morning - half an inch or more. The streets are entirely clear and the day is luminous. Moisture on the driveway and in the streets in places, where snow has melted. The snow was wet enough it is burdening all the trees and bushes still. There is no wind so snow shall cling until the sun does its work, expected soon.

It is the ordinary I find attractive. Today is an ordinary day - only it's extraordinarily lovely.
In the country, a fog reduces visibility. A seed enclosed in the seed pod. A day not yet opened entirely. The thin snow adds a virginal quality. At Five Corners - donkeys in the fog, on snow: they are a bright surprise. Some photographer for National Geographic could do them justice. The scene reminds me: Don't weigh the day too soon.

Tuesday, March 3, 1998
The roads and fields and streets were clear of snow last evening as I drove home from work. This morning, again, a thin layer of snow on everything - a fine, powdery dusting, like the ashes of many men scattered here. Today has more of winter in its fiber than any in February. Still it is much too nice a day to run from.
The snow makes the roads slippery in places. That is something we can depend on. We go through life wanting certainty - well, here it is.
The field of rye, greening, has snow caught in its teeth this morning.

The overland trail to Oregon and California still shows in places on the western landscape. The snow today highlights tracks in the fields along my way. The snow points and says: "Someone has gone this way."

The sun wants to break through but there are too many ragged clouds hanging. Looking out across the roll of land beneath them, it is so difficult to peel off the past 200 years, to see the land as it once was, original and primal. Why would anyone want to, you ask. Why would anyone not?

Wednesday, March 4, 1998
Yesterday's snow is gone, pretty much. Clouds cross the sky from different directions, different colors, as if the day does not know where it is going. It is a little crisp around the edge, a little brisk, and a very, very fine snow peppers on the windshield. The pond down the hill from our house has been entirely open for more than a week. The wind disturbs its surface this morning. Across the pond, the cold steel of railroad tracks. Brown and gray, today, and very little white.

Some things we do for love, some we do for money. Some things we do not know why we do them. Out of habit, perhaps - comfort. We live with pain, sometimes, because we are comfortable with it - more comfortable than with the alternative. It is better to die, we think, than to be afraid.

I am no innocent bystander. I am as guilty as the rest. Water follows the path of least resistance and so, sometimes, does man.
A face along the way, of one who used to work for me - a smile and a wave.

The snow in the air thickens.

Thursday, March 5, 1998
I suppose the first thing they have to teach those Navy fellows out to sea is not to shoot through the floor. Which maybe explains why they are so conservative. And bull-headed. The ship has to be sinking before they'll listen.

A fine powder of snow, but not enough even to use the windshield wipers while the truck warms up. Cool and grey, this morning; serious, but not somber. If the sap is rising, today it pauses.

At the edge of Fairwater, I notice that Johnson Street now goes all the way through to the bevy of new houses behind the Village Mart. Okay, Tom, pop quiz: How long has it been open? How long have you failed to notice?

Stones are conservative, definitely conservative. Like Navy men. Trees are liberal. Stones get where they are going but it's always with a lot of grunting and puffing. Trees, why sometimes they fly.

Stoneboat. Stone boat. Stone. Boat.

Feathers fluffed - fat birds!

Even when other people are having seconds, don't ask for more. What we are given is enough. Today is enough. This is enough.

Friday, March 6, 1998
Snow this morning, an inch or more. A warm day. The edges of things are damp even as the snow accumulates on the lawns and some places in the street. Where you are determines what you can be: today I would be a March snowman, jolly but not very long for this world.
A neighbor, walking. I see him often in the morning. Those who walk believe. We must believe. Each mile is another minute of breath on this blue, whirling planet.

It doesn't matter if it's green - today the surface of the field cannot be seen. The snow. Don't even try.

Snow plow heading south as I head north. A crust of ice and snow blasted into the air. Salt scattering on the highway. Like the taste of blood. Like a moist kiss, so deep and insistent you cannot get air. Hear the orange blade of the plow rumble on the pavement. See snow hanging onto the trees, as if the branches can catch and hold the light.

Near St. Pat's Church in Ripon, an old man shovels snow. Another day.

Saturday, March 7, 1998
On my flight from Milwaukee to Atlanta, two college girls are my seat-mates. We are Row 16. It is Spring Break.

The girl next to me takes out a composition book. It is her journal. She makes an entry:
"I am so glad I'm getting the hell out of Wisconsin. I can't wait to lay back on the beach. I will wear almost nothing."

The other girl has just broken up with her boyfriend. She shares a poem with her friend, a poem she had written for her boyfriend before the break-up. This girl keeps a journal, too, and the poem is part of her journal. When her friend has finished reading the poem, she flips the page like she is looking for more.

There is no more poem but there is more - something about Ripon, Wisconsin. Something on another page about "FUCK THEM. FUCK THEM ALL." Then a single page in huge block letters, near the final entry, filling the whole page, letters that big: "FUCK YOU."

"I have always been too shy," says the girl next to me. "I have been afraid to tell people what I think. Sometimes it's better if you tell them what's on your mind."

"That's not my problem," says the other girl. "My problem is I tell people what I think. I am never afraid to tell them. It gets you in trouble. Sometimes it would be better just to shut up."
"Honesty is the best policy," says the girl next to me. "I think you should always say what you think."

"Honesty is not always the best policy," says the other girl. "If you stick to that policy, you won't have any friends. It is better to lie or to shut up."

"My brother was six and I was three," says the girl next to me. "We managed to lose our parents in Disney World. We have been self-reliant ever since. We managed to lose them again in Hong Kong and survived. When we got to Paris, they kept a close eye on us. We were such jet brats."

"When I lived in Micronesia," the other girl says, "I had a friend who lived on Okinawa. We lived close to each other, we thought. But Okinawa was 2,000 miles from where I lived. Micronesia, taken all together, maybe has the land mass of Rhode Island. But it's spread out over an area the size of the continental United States."

"I want to lay back in the sun," says the girl next to me. "I want to be alone on the beach. The last thing I want to see are boys."

"My dad called," she says. "I was telling him about my trip. He said, 'Honey, you have to be so careful these days, they've got a drug they can slip into your drink.' I said 'Like, Dad, give me some credit.' What, does he think I'm entirely innocent? It's not like I'm going to the beach to get drunk on my face and get laid. I just want to lay back in the sun and be left the hell alone."

Sunday, March 8, 1998
I am walking the streets of Atlanta this morning. I stop at Georgia State University, in front of the Baptist Student Union. A sign in the window says "Christians Rock the House." The sign in the other window says "Jesus Saves." I do not need saving today.

A fifteen minute walk away and I am standing near Atlanta's "24 Hour Dance Club." It is Sunday morning. It is 10:00 a.m. It is time for church. And up and down Peach Tree Street there are all manner and variety of churches, historic and beautiful churches.

The 24-hour dance club is in an old three story brick building, a former warehouse, perhaps. The heavy bass and the drum beat are loosening the mortar. On the down beat, you can almost see between the bricks. A wail of voice cries out, escapes the building. More bass and drum. The sidewalk almost shudders. Another wail of voice crying out on a Sunday morning. Bleery-eyed dancers must be holding each other up, praying to their various gods for relief, for sweet relief. Another shudder of bass and more drum. I think: "It's good to be alive this morning, and sober."
Later, two girls are walking up Peach Tree Street towards me, carrying boxes. They're white girls. The boxes are big. The red-head is smoking a cigarette. She says "I was fucked up last night, y'all."
*
Cajun food in Atlanta. The man behind the counter is hawking his chicken. "Try some world famous chicken," he says. "World Famous Bourbon Chicken, just like New Orleans. Try some chicken." He sounds Cajun. He pronounces "chicken" like he's got something rolling around on his tongue. You try it - soft boil an egg and put it in your mouth. Now say "World Famous Bourbon Chicken." That's how he sounded.
*
In a place like downtown Atlanta, where it is near wall-to-wall concrete, you do not get a sense of the place in terms of the landscape. Instead, you read the place much more in terms of the people, of their rituals and habits.

Still, when a storm rolls in as it did this afternoon, you recognize that all this concrete, piled high as it might be, is not enough: the tallest tower visible out the window of my hotel room disappears into cloud. Half the city is - suddenly - gone. The sudden darkness of the torm brings on all the street lights I can see.

Rain starts to pour down; it continues into the darkness of night. Near the elevator shafts in the hotel, the wind roars and roars - the draft strong enough to tousle my hair like a grandfather saying hello to a barefoot child.

Wednesday, March 11, 1998
It is afternoon. I am sitting in the Atlanta airport. Outside, the day is sunny, but cold. Here, in Terminal South, life is interesting. If you sit in the airport of a major city for long enough, you will see everything. If you sit in Atlanta's airport for ten minutes, you'll see enough to make you wonder "How much more could there be?"

I have eaten a Dominoes 6" pizza. I have had two scoops of ice cream. I have listened to a couple of men nearby trading dirty jokes. And now I am sitting near two men with closely cropped hair speaking a foreign language I have not identified. Either they are soccer players from a middle European country or they are terrorists. Actually, they look too old to be soccer players.

Sitting here you can think about place - life comes and goes past this chair at a tremendous pace. I notice that some people will wear anything in public; particularly I am thinking of women who should not be wearing some of these clothes even in the privacy of their own home. Tall and short, thin and thick and very thick, black and white and all shades and colors between. There is nowhere along my drive to work at home to see life of this pace and variety. Why would we want to?

Although I have to confess I am intrigued by all the possible stories that might be walking past me: business travelers in their suits, young adventurers with duffel bags and torn blue jeans, black security guards, pilots, women traveling alone with young children. The children themselves - what do they think of this? Old men with flowing grey locks.

I give $15.00 to a young black fellow who says he lost his ticket last night on a two hour layover from Florida to Carolina. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Good story. Good acting. It is worth $15.00 to see his jaw drop when I hand him the bills.

You won't see any of this between Fairwater and Ripon.

Thursday, March 12, 1998
You cannot go away, you simply cannot: it will not be the same when you return. It is clear and cold. There is snow on the ground, quite a lot of it. A blizzard passed through while I was gone. It was spring when I left - woolly bear caterpillars and fat robins. It is not spring now. A skin of ice on the pond again. Stiff fingers to clear the windshield.

You cannot go away, you will not be the same when you return. Where you have been, what you have seen, these will make you see differently.

What do I see today? Long shadows of the gravestones in the Fairwater cemetery. Ditches drifted full of snow, or nearly so. A world that has its cap pulled down over its ears. Dirt in the snow drifts. Fields brushed by the wind - like a dooryard swept smooth with a broom. A bright dome of blue, blue sky. Red barns and white houses. A cat dead on the road. Salt stains on the asphalt. A world I love. Home.

Friday, March 13, 1998
Sweet home. Sweet morning. Overcast, today, but cold still. The snow remains, firm and vigilant, looking for any cranny to drift into. Life repeats itself day after day, just not exactly, so my day is somewhat different from my grandfather's. Still, the golden chain of moments, the instants of change, brought me here, in a cold vehicle with the heater running, waiting for the engine to warm up before I head off to work.

There are snowbanks along the curbs again in Fairwater. We'd thought they were gone. The Grand River is still flowing freely, though the pond is frozen over. (But I wouldn't walk on that ice.) I suppose the robins are surprised!
The ugliness of snowdrifts soiled by what the wind has picked up from the fields, the ugliness stands out this morning.

It seems to be snowing again, now. Snow dances across the road. Heavy snow is coming at the windshield. This is not Atlanta. Spring has not come yet.

Like a magician, the snow makes a line of trees disappear. Good morning, Wisconsin!

Monday, March 16, 1998
Where you are - here - molds expectations. Midwesterners as a rule expect that if they put seed in the ground in spring and tend it during the summer, they will have a crop to bring in come fall. We don't expect to rush the process and we recognize there are a host of factors - drought and hail, for instance - which could destroy the crop. This pattern of work and reward shapes our outlook on life. There are no free lunches. There is no shortening the process.

A bright blue sky this morning. A brisk day - layer of frost on the windshield. Not so drab a day as yesterday.

Were I an Indian, my name would be Long Light. Perhaps it is anyway.

Our driveway and the streets are clear of snow now. There is a solid crunch to the snow that remains - lawn and plowbank and field and ditch.

Clouds to the northwest. I am lost in them, lost in myself this morning. I have no thoughts, simply impressions of myself as an empty vessel (when I notice anything at all).

Tuesday, March 17, 1998
Do we welcome strangers? No, as a rule, we do not. Generally we want this land held for us - whoever we may be - rather than handed over to them. When Mary and I first moved to Fairwater, we were "Them." The house we bought was "the Hankerson house" and remained so for many years. People would say "Oh, you live in the Hankerson house" as if nothing had changed. We have our shorthands, our habits, and now - twenty two years on this land - I am guilty too. "Who are those strangers," I might say, "and what are they doing here?"

The air as I step outside this morning is like a soft, warm cloth. Still, there is a light frost on the windshield. A light haze above. A mourning dove perched on the peak of the roof of the reddest house in Fairwater. There is nothing so disappointed as the green flower stalks poking through snow on the east side of the house.

Old wood, we know, has been loved by the sun, loved and left. We see it in the barn at the grove where lives the hawk - the sadness of the wood.

The field of rye, so green last month, is white with frost this morning.

Near Five Corners, a man pulls out of his driveway with a boat on the trailer behind his pick-up. What did I miss?

The state of the nation: When you are mixed up in a can of worms it is not enough to say they don't taste so bad.

Wednesday, March 18, 1998
The sun comes up. The sun goes down. We go to work. We come home. Spring follows winter. Summer, then fall. We sow our seed, we reap our rewards. Life and the universe are predictable, aren't they? Well, at least in broad outlines.

This morning, freezing rain is falling. The certainties of life are set aside. It is with care I step outside, with care I try my footing on the driveway. "It's quite a mess out there," they've said.

It is a little slippery in the drive. It is an ugly day everywhere. The sky is definitely unhappy. Water is running in the street. The sheen on the asphalt is slippery only occasionally. All of us are driving carefully.

The wind wants to blow my pick-up around. Silly geese are flying in sets of three. With the rain, the old barn has turned a lonely kind of gray, like the hair of an old man without family. In places, sleet accumulates along the side of the road. Ice is building on the trees along my way, worse the farther north I drive. A mighty wind is roaring - as if a train still comes through your town. Listen for the wail of the whistle. Listen for the cry. It is an ugly day and I love it. Go figure.

There are high school girls driving in these conditions. They look much too young. Do we ever get old enough for it?

Thursday, March 19, 1998
Another grey day, the sky spitting sleet or crunchy little snow balls. The street is covered with it - here and there, the tracks of early morning traffic.

Meditation on place each morning. The physical and the metaphysical. A question mark in each morning sky - where am I and why am I here. Many times we are simply content to record that we have passed this way. Some of us, sometimes, bring ourselves to ask Why me? Why here? Why now? What vortex of forces spins me into this present, in this place, with these people. Does a billion years of evolution come to this? If he thinks too much about such things, even an atheist may turn to God.

Ice an eighth of an inch thick on the windshield - not easily removed. The driveway is slippery. The sleet turns to snow. As the engine of the pick up warms up, I catch my breath from the strenuous scraping of the windshield.

Then we roll the dice and take our chances. The tires spin in the street at the end of the driveway, even at idle, even in second gear. I think we'll take our time this morning. At the edge of town, County E looks clear, but damp. Farther north, it turns snow covered and slippery. The salt truck has not been out.

Most of the geese are hunkered down among broken corn stalks. A few fly, in pairs today. The fields look as if they have been dusted with flour for baking.

The wind has the electrical wires swinging fiercely; between the poles, they look like snakes or like waves coming in off an angry ocean. I have never before seen the wires move so violently. They could easily break and whip onto the road. Even a single tree in the vicinity calms them.

In Ripon, an old woman walks across the street to church. Each step of the way, she sets her cane down so very carefully.

Friday, March 20, 1998
Fresh out of the shower, armored with optimism, we step out to face the new day. It should be like starting with a blank slate, but soon old scores come 'round to be settled, new troubles rear their heads, and soon even the brightest, bluest sky would be the kind of grey sludge we have overhead this morning. You take your weapon out of the holster, do what you have to.

It is supposed to be spring, but that we had in February. Instead we now have another taste of the winter that never really came this year. Not so bad today as yesterday, but not spring either. At least there is nothing to scrape from the windshield. And - somewhere - there are birds talking, likely complaining about the weather like the rest of us.

I think of a friend, this morning, who has finished her schooling but cannot find a job. There is that kind of chill to the day. To the northwest, perhaps a break in the clouds. Perhaps a job opportunity in her field for our friend. The sun tries to break through the overcast. Friends are those who pray for you even before you ask.

There is a sheen of glaze to the snow in the fields, as if a little sun and wind have smoothed the whiteness. The right hand of winter is light sometimes, is heavy; is tender and tough; is sweet, is angry.

Sunday, March 22, 1998
Waking in Another Place
Waking in another place, and rising, is not the same as waking and rising at home. So stated, the fact is obvious; but how so, the differences?

This morning I am in Minneapolis, not in Fairwater. I find my orientation to the morning light is different than at home. The light here falls on my face rather than coming from behind. The light here is moderated by blinds, rather than by curtains as at home. The light is a little lower at the same time of morning.

I have been sleeping in a strange bed, of course, and I was also sleeping on the wrong side of the bed; and sleeping on my right side, I was facing into my wife rather than facing away from her as at home.

The sounds of the house as I rise are not the sounds of my house - a different refrigerator, a different cat, a different toilet, different traffic. These are sounds I have cataloged as morning sounds in my world, but they are a half a click from being accurate.

The floor here is carpeted instead of finished wood as in our bedroom at home.

I cannot find coffee this morning, in this house, and so I am drinking hot tea.

As at home, these early morning hours I have made my own are quiet, lit palely, comfortable like a blanket. I am writing at the kitchen table here, not at my work space at home with familiar materials nearby.

How is it the same, the waking? I woke on my own here, as I usually do at home. I woke about 5:30 a.m. today as is often the case in Fairwater. Here and there - the regular sound of my wife's breathing, that steady engine pumping air. In both places, I wake with the desire to write, or to read. This morning, I am making these notes; at home I would be working on journal or book.

Out the window, a very light, very, very light dusting of snow. I wonder if it snowed at home.

Tuesday, March 24, 1998
A fair and lovely day, blue and warm. A little frost on the windshield. You can smell spring, though. Bright sun on the red of our house. Our home.

We think "home" when we look at the landscape, an Indian says. The land is people, he says. I think "home" this morning.

Ghosts walk this land - farmsteads and fields, roads and paths, all the way to Ripon. Look at them. Look at them! Those who heaped up rocks in piles. Those who pulled the fences taut. Those who built the houses, barns, and cribs. Those who put in power lines and telephone poles. Those who turned the soil, who chased the cows home for milking. Those who walked here, then left. Those who stayed. Those strangers who settled here, and their children and their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. Every track crossing every swell of land. The light of every morning sun, every sunset. Every day, to survive another day; to leave a better world.

Look at them, these ghosts around us.

Wednesday, March 25, 1998
Another fine spring morning. A little cool in the blustery March wind, but this is not winter. Yesterday's sun has melted much of the snow. A drabness grabs the land once again, with only the palest hint of green behind it.

We're told that home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in. Look at the land and think of home: then it is this land that has to take me in. Home is where you belong. This is where I belong. I can imagine visiting other places but cannot imagine leaving here permanently.

The snowbanks at the end of our driveway will be gone by tomorrow or Friday, despite the grey cast of the morning. The robins are obvious once again. North of Fairwater, a few geese fly in the distance. Sea gulls land nearer the road. Last night I heard a sandhill crane; Mary has already seen some.

The plowed ground looks moist and sticky. A few days of warm wind will dry it out.

What we are is agricultural: planting and tending and reaping has made us human. Or at least that's what I've read. What a novel idea this morning, but one I can believe. These are the fields, these here along my way.

There are still quite the dirty piles of snow in Barlow Park in Ripon, where the city has dumped its truckloads cleared from streets and parking lots - when I was in Atlanta, I assume.

Children ride bicycles to school this morning. One youngster walks with his calves bared to the elements. Obviously, now, it is not only the robins and the cranes which think spring has arrived.

It may rain later today, by the look of the sky here, now.

Thursday, March 26, 1998
Warm, warm sun on my face as I walk out to the pick-up. The bug looking at me through the windshield is a mosquito - a very large mosquito. Spring is sprung fully from the blue sky above. The snowbanks at the end of our driveway are gone.

A day this beautiful - people will speak kindly to one another all day long.

The Grand River runs high and fast like a brush-back pitch thrown to let you know who owns the plate. I see they are laying out another street, staking out more houses behind the Village Mart. What is wrong with the way it used to be? A ghost town is okay with me.
A dead rabbit this morning, a dead possum. The blue sky has not been kind to them.

To the northeast, beyond Carter Road, a flock of geese is moving. There is a bank of clouds to the north. Here and there, water stands in ditch and field. A hint of green in the fields, like a vague, restless desire. The lawns in Ripon are greener today than yesterday.

Ride the morning like a fast horse. Love it like she's a wild woman. Let it take all of you, today, like whiskey would.

Monday, March 30, 1998
Having been south over the weekend as far as Chicago, I have seen green of grass and field, flowers, leaves wanting to bud. Here, this morning, the sky wants rain. It is gray, humid, wet.

The lawns here are green now, too. A neighbor is out clearing his of winter debris. He is an old man who rises early and he appears ready for spring, stooped to pick up branches and clots of leaves. Around him his world wants to turn green.

You wonder what the fences - the remnants of fences, actually - have seen over the years. What has transpired as they've sagged and leaned askew? A school bus, this morning, a sand truck, people driving to work - that's what they see today.

A typical Monday morning, except that it is green. And, as I head farther north, it is raining.
In the dreary gray of rain, downtown Ripon looks like an old town, very much like an old town. When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

Tuesday, March 31, 1998
Yesterday afternoon and evening, the skies opened up - a heavy deluge! The streets were running deep with water in places, debris being washed along. It is still wet and wild and windy this morning. We wonder, briefly, why we've chosen to love this place, then think perhaps this place has chosen us.

It is still spitting rain today and the grass turns greener while I watch it. Tulips and windflowers are up and feisty in the breeze. There are worms out on the driveway, in the streets.

Tomorrow is April Fool's.

In downtown Fairwater, gravel has piled up where it was washing across the road. Out in the country north of town, pools of water stand in fields and ditches.

The season has changed - a tractor and tank trailer from the canning factory are out on Highway E, heading north. The field of winter rye has become a thick green carpet. The ditches are greening up too. I should not have to speak again of things turning green. An even bigger change than the grass turning green is the number of small birds that are around now - on lawns and powerlines and flying above the road.

You could say it is a raw, ugly morning, but consider the alternative.

Tomorrow is April Fool's.

How would my life be different if I had awakened today living somewhere else. How would it be if I had awakened here as someone else. Who you are determines pretty much what you can see. I am definitely my father's son. What if instead I was driving to a dead-end job flipping burgers. Would I love this raw day as much?

Wednesday, April 1, 1998 - April Fool's
The writing life is the life lived. The life lived is the writing life. I can no longer distinguish between them. The edges have blurred. What I do and what I write about have come together and it makes no sense trying to keep them separate any longer. I suppose many writers come to this point. Yes, it is difficult to find publishable chunks of material, if publishable chunks is what one's after. For myself, for now, I am finding it difficult to distinguish between what is journal, what is essay, what is poem, what is history, what is life. The silken web vibrates everywhere as I write here, now. How can our weekend trip to Chicago be disconnected from the Hargrave journals, from this morning drive, from my next poem. In all the wonder of this sense of oneness, my challenge will be not to get lost, to remember where I am going.

I am known to fabricate reality from nothing when it suits me. This morning, being April Fool's, would be the perfect opportunity to do so, with a vengeance. I find the prospect doesn't attract me. Perhaps because it is expected today. It comes at no cost today. Anyone can do it today and get away with it. I'd much rather fabricate on the off days the rest of the year, I think.

Today is strange in other ways. After two days of rain, the ground is soaked. The sky is soaked, sloppy with clouds still, except to the far west of here where some clouds seem to be catching light from the sun, looking pink and golden like a sunrise off in the wrong direction.

It has been a sloppy sky. Likely we tell ourselves it cannot possibly snow again - hell, it could snow tonight. Never say never in Wisconsin. Never say never on April Fool's Day or Halloween. If you can't take a joke, move to Los Angeles.

The streets are still wet. Children wait for the school bus in front of Leahy's Tap. The Grand River is running high and hard this morning. There is a definite break in the clouds to the west, as if it is a new front coming in. A red-wing blackbird, geese, a robin. The trees are setting buds, definitely setting buds. Water is moving in the ditches.

My pick-up has just now turned 95,000 miles; I put on more than 50,000 of those, most of them on this stretch of road again and again.

All the nameless faces - sometimes I think I shall know them in another context, another day.

Thursday, April 2, 1998
The drive from my house to Five Corners is about five miles; from Five Corners to the printing plant where I work is another five miles, almost. I have worked there for nearly twenty years; I have made the drive five days a week, fifty weeks a year: 20 x 50 x 5 x 20 = approaching 120,000 miles spent driving to and from work these past twenty years. It takes me about fifteen minutes each way: 20 x 50 x 5 x 15 = 75,000 minutes div. by 60 = 1250 hours div. by an 8-hour day = more than 156 8-hour days spent driving to and from work. What do I have to show for those days?

There was another front coming through yesterday, bringing more rain. The sky is grey this morning but the streets are dry. Leaf buds are swollen. There are flowers next to our garage - daffodils - they will want to bloom soon if it warms up. It is a cool wind still that ripples the surface of the pond down the hill.
Wild geese sit in pooled water in a farmyard just north of town. What have they to fear? What have I to fear? I have forgotten to get gas in the pick-up and do not know how many miles I have left in my tank, as the gas gauge has been broken for years.

Near Five Corners there is a fine mist on the windshield. If I run out of gas, I will be walking in the rain. Likely I won't be singing in the rain.

At the edge of Ripon there is a crow eating a deer long dead in the ditch. It flaps its wings with satisfaction. Unless we are making something new, we too are feeding on carrion.

Friday, April 3, 1998
Am I a farmer because my father was a farmer? I am stamped by the farm experience, certainly, but I left the farm. It is too hard a life for me. Are these farmers here because their fathers were? Well, there are not many, I think, who choose farming without having grown up in it. On the other hand, there may be midwestern farmers trapped in the bodies of California surf boys. There may be California surf boys trapped in the bodies of midwestern farmers - though I doubt that. Certainly I am stamped indelibly by the farm experience. Look at my poetry, look at my prose. See the concerns. Feel the rhythms.

This is not unique to the farm experience - it is the result of any relatively differentiated experience. I did not grow up in "generic" America, though perhaps my daughters have - well, less so perhaps as we had no TV in the house for ten years and they learned to read.
The noise of birds. A tank full of gas. Grey sky. A cool breeze. Lovely April.

The gravel that had washed onto Main Street in Fairwater has been cleared off and tamped back in the places it belongs.

There is water running in the ditches still.
An empty drive this morning. I am in it, I am mindful, I am quiet. Silence, too, is a feature of the landscape, of this drive to work, of life, and it should be included. Here it is, some of it.

Monday, April 6, 1998
The cycle of things - life and death. Birth and rebirth. Today it is so close to home. A sister-in-law was diagnosed over the weekend with cancer already metatisized to the bone. Seed put in the ground, seedling taking nourishment, driving towards light, driving towards leaving something of itself behind, for the future. It is the cycle of life. We are sad with our loss. You can say it's not fair. You can say "That's life." We are sad and we go on. Waste your breath with cursing and you are short of breath. Still, I want to say to the dark-shrouded figure, "Go away from our door."

A different light this morning - we have changed to daylight savings time. It is 7:30 a.m now but the sky is still 6:30 a.m. The pond is as smooth as a mirror. Reflections in it are still and exact. The wild night-life fellow in me hates to say it: I like this time of day.

The Grand River is still high and fast.

The hawk is perched atop a tree in the middle of its field. It is looking for breakfast. Its feast is always the death of something else.

Water is still running in the ditches. Water is standing in the fields.

We shall live for awhile in the house of death.

Tuesday, April 7, 1998
Our daylight makes a difference. Now 5:00 a.m. is dark again and it is harder for me to rise in the dark. At the other end of the day, I have more time for a walk in the country. The body clock does not "spring ahead" so easily as the clock on the wall, however. Yet we submit ourselves to this every year on the basis of perceived benefits. I confess I do like longer light in the evening. And once the sun finds 5:00 a.m. again, it's not so tough getting up in the morning.

Sometimes I think there is irony in the fact that I drive to work in suit and tie at the same time I am thinking about this piece of land, of fields, of farmers. The suit and tie is not a farmer's attire, not the finery of the greening land. Well, the farm boy can put on his disguise and enter the house of business.

It is definitely spring. Red breasted robin on the green carpet of lawn in the long lay of morning light. The sounds of birds. A bright sky today. Geese in the fields, feeding. The fields are trying to dry - though there is still a lot of moisture in places. Water still runs fast in the ditches near Five Corners. Green, lush, moist spring. Sweet, like a young love you know will never last.

Wednesday, April 8, 1998
April rain and bluster. It is like the short, skinny kid bragging how good he is. He might beat you once or twice but eventually you wear him down. He simply doesn't have the mass to back up his swagger.

It's not raining exactly, but the wind is wet. The clouds are streaky, like dirty windows. Almost like snow clouds, in the distance. The day is not yet as raw as it looks.

In downtown Fairwater, the flag is just now being raised in front of the Post Office. There are wild geese, still, in the water standing in the farmyard. A noisy wind in the open country. The land wants to shake itself like a wet dog, to dry off. There is a light mist on the windshield, however, and you can almost smell the rain in the distance. Within a mile, I drive into it.

Geese circle, looking for a place to set down. It is serious water running in the ditches at Five Corners. Wipers on the windshield sound like a sleeping man grinding his teeth.

Count this as another day.

On Watson Street in Ripon, the crossing guard, an old woman, is wearing bunny ears this morning. I laugh. I smile and have to wave at her. One more day, yes.

Thursday, April 9, 1998
If you have nothing to say, Ben says, say nothing.

It is that kind of morning. Chilly. Wet. Wisconsin in April. Nothing should surprise us.

Does one have nothing to say because one is empty, or because he hasn't explored what he thinks? Is it a wasteland because there is nothing there or because we haven't yet figured out how to exploit it?

It is very dark to the east. The clouds look heavy as sadness. The farmyard is thick with wild geese today. My pick-up bucks the same wind as this morning's sea gulls - all of us are going nowhere fast. The plowed fields have a sheen of mud on them, like a salesman's slicked back hair. Still the water runs heavy in the ditches - will it never cease?

If I didn't have the geese as companions for this morning's ride, what would I have?

Friday, April 10, 1998
The birds were making a hell of a racket this morning as the sun came up. What was that a sign of? What promise were they making? What do they know that I do not? It is Good Friday. This is the day the Lord has made.
I walk out the door to the pick-up. A mourning dove calls - woo-woo-woo. It sits high in the tree at the southeast corner of our property. Flowers are showing their colors. The sky is blue. Life goes on.

The sky is blue above. In the distance in all directions, there are clouds. The sun in my eyes as I drive east on Washington Street in Fairwater makes me sneeze. Downtown, the Grand River is running higher than it has all spring. The rush of water makes and re-makes the earth.

The morning's shadows are moveable stains. There is swift water in the ditches. There is a goose at the edge of the road. There may be a thin glaze of ice where water is standing. It does not seem so chilly as that - I am in shirt sleeves.

Repairs will be made to Watson Street in Ripon. Wasn't it resurfaced just two years ago? Our winters are tough on asphalt.

As I write this, sitting in the parking lot of the plant, facing east, the sun through the windshield of the pick-up is hot on my face.

Monday, April 13, 1998
Grey clouds this morning, like rolled oats. Yesterday was a holy day. Today is not - well, perhaps we should ask the birds, who sing as if it is. They call and call. You could not run away from the sound of their calling even if you wanted to.

The daffodils are bright, bold strokes of yellow, opened to contrast with the greyness overhead. The forsythia is set against the redness of our house. Without such color, we'd be overwhelmed with sadness, wouldn't we?
I am leaving a half an hour earlier than usual this morning. There is a red cast to the trees in this light, their swollen buds. The world is full of adolescent urgency. Still the river runs high.

Yesterday at noon in full brightness the land looked more desolate than it does this morning in the diffused light. Farmers have been working the high ground. Low areas are still wet. Water is still standing. Water is still running in the ditches. Has the water been running harder and longer this year than in the past? I do not know. I am tempted to say yes, but I have no facts to base that on.

On Watson Street in Ripon, spring clippings are piled at the curb for city pick-up. Even those of us who are not farmers must do something in this season.

Tuesday, April 15, 1998
It rained yesterday. Broken clouds and blue sky above, this morning. A dark front seems to be moving in from the west. There is a pattern to all this - to the weather, to the roll of our days, to the turn of the season - though sometimes I do not discern it. It seems, sometimes, simply a roiling, grey mass around me. I know that's not true, but often I'm not able to find the end of the string and tug out what is special. It would be even worse, I suppose, in a climate less given to extremes, less blessed with the color of its changes. The tropical fellows would likely say "No problem, mon!" but I wonder. Lethargy is the fruit of sameness. When we come through a tough blizzard, at least we can feel blessed that we have survived.

Smug midwesterner, no?

"Yeah, mon."

Very Canadian clouds this morning. Daffodils bent low by yesterday's rain. A wind. The call of a goose overhead.

Still a high, hurried river coming through Fairwater. Still wild geese in the farm yard. Still fierce water in the ditches.

The farmers have been making progress in the fields - corn stalks are being disked into the soil.

When did they disappear - the piles of snow that had been heaped up in the park in Ripon? I do not know. I haven't been paying attention very carefully, have I?

"No, mon, you have not."

Wednesday, April 15, 1998
OK, so I need a weatherman to tell me which way the wind blows! The dark front I saw to the west yesterday missed us. It was blue sky that blew in, it was a beautiful spring day that we got, all the way to evening. This morning, by contrast, looks grey and moist.

A calm morning, as if the gods partied late last night and are still asleep. They will not disturb us, perhaps, if we do not disturb them.

Ah, but rain is predicted, my wife has said. Perhaps if we don't disturb them, they will leave us the hell alone.

Forsythia blossoms are falling on our lawn. They make a yellowed lace on the grass.

Lawns are starting to thicken in Fairwater. My God, some of them may need mowing soon. I'll pray for snow to slow them down.

No wild geese in the farmyard today. The air looks moist, misty in the distance.

The knobs in some of the fields - high points that are not cultivated - are green with grasses now. The bride gets dressed at her own pace. She is lovely. She will be lovelier still.

Water runs in the ditches yet - they are like creeks.

Bright flowers at the corner of Barlow Park as I come into Ripon.

Sometimes we are touched by angels. Who rides shot-gun with me?

The grass in front of our printing plant has been mowed. Too late to hope the snow will do any good!

Thursday, April 16, 1998
Rain did come yesterday. I walked in it to go to lunch at noon, walked in it again at quitting time. Water in the ditches on the way home was running fiercely as a result. The world goes on re-making itself, whatever we think or do. It is still grey and wet this morning, and somewhat chilly, too.

I often say what we get is a reflection of what we give. We create our reality to some extent. We are about as happy as we choose to be. Shall I curse these wet streets or praise Allah for the moisture. Knee-jerk response is not enough but often it is all we muster.

Not fifty miles north of here, they got three to five inches of snow; that will slow their lawns some.

One of our daffodils is entirely beaten to the ground. The forsythia is half nekked - her yellow dress gathered in a heap 'round her feet.

In this chill, my breath steams the inside of the windshield.

The river in Fairwater runs even higher - a torrent. Harmsens seem to be replacing their porch - at least there is work being done on it.
A red-wing blackbird sitting on a fence. Now that sounds like the start of a child's rhyme. What rhymes with fence?

Hence, thence, whence. Dense, pence, tense.
Tents, cents, dents. Gents, rents, vents.

Is it true the search for clarity is a search for truth? The bare fields look slick and greasy this morning.

The windshield wipers, all the way to Ripon.

The wind, all the way to Ripon.

At Five Corners, the ditches run heavy with water. The world falls all over itself trying to keep up with itself.

This life is too good a show to want to leave behind. See the girl with the puzzled look. Give me another day like this.

Friday, April 17, 1998
Blue sky. A bright day. O spring. Hope is eternal. We march forward, another day. On a day like this, on cannot despair. You gird yourself for battle and once again you win. It's that simple. In war, in business, in love.

The river through Fairwater still runs high.
What we call prairies - Round Prairie just north and east of Fairwater, Mackford Prairie south and west. Why do we call them that? I assume our fathers saw these swells of land as flat and grassy plains like prairies.

Three geese against the blue of sky. They are heading north. Three sea gulls, heading east.
People died in storms across the south yesterday. Today, here, the sky looks so innocent. We know it can turn on us in a moment, though.

New and tiny leaves on the trees are now staining them their pale green. It is as if the sky behind the trees is tinted.

Water continues to run in the ditches at Five Corners. It is chilly enough that where the water is calm a skin of ice has formed.

Monday, April 20, 1998
Well - once this was prairie, open ground as far as the eye could see. North of here were the woods, the pineries. If we had anything here it was small clusters of oak. Those days are gone.

The geese seem to have gone north. There are not many of them around now. The skies are quiet except for the occasional sandhill crane and its raucous cries.

A blue sky today. Our lawn has been mowed already this season by the young ruffian who has been taking care of it in past years. It is April only! It will be a long mowing season if this keeps up.

The two daffodils near the garage have recovered from their bout with wind and rain; they are standing straight again, or nearly so. Windflowers are low and bright along the house. The Grand River is less fierce coming through town. Weeds are taking hold of the plowed fields north of town. A haze in the distance, then clouds. If we had a mountain, we would not be able to see it today perhaps. The water in the ditches near Five Corners has slowed considerably. No reason to speak of it again, I think. One of the newly built houses along Highway E between Five Corners and Ripon is for sale again, for the second time, so soon. It is the house where, this past winter, a car plowed through the snow, through the ditch, and into the yard.

Tuesday, April 21, 1998
The reassuring sound of a mourning dove taking flight from our driveway. Praise Allah, some things are constant.

I have nothing much to say this morning. So perhaps I shall be brief. Well, actually I've never been known to let having nothing to say slow me down. So hold on.

At a neighbors' the grandma has been staying with them while she waits to move into a new place. She parks her car on the street overnight. It is a church-mobile. The back bumper is a sermon. I am reminded of the Pharisees.

One of the old houses downtown along Highway 44 in Fairwater looks like it is being prepared for re-siding.

The fields are being worked, some of them. Some are still too wet.

The day is overcast, and cool enough that the bird on the wire is plumping its feathers. It is a blackbird, I think. I put bird watchers in the same class as fly fishermen. Black-headed gulls float in standing water in fields along the road, as they have for the past few days. I do not know which gull they are. I don't fly fish, either.

A young man walks the railroad track to school. There is a metaphor in that, perhaps.

Wednesday, April 22, 1998
This morning the sun is like a bucket of bright paint spilled across the land. O blue sky! When we die, when we go to heaven, those who will, this will be a day in heaven. Let me appreciate it now.

Of course, it is neither hot now, nor cold, so perhaps I should spit it out. Nahhh....

The trees are making a stronger green statement. Their stain against the sky is becoming serious. They will soon have leaves we can't deny.

My wife is proud of her wind flowers along the house. They are bright this morning. I am proud of my wife.

Today is bulky article pick-up in Fairwater. The curbs are covered with junk. Junk. Why do you keep it and where did you put it, I ask of no one in particular. The junk we accumulate is proportionate to the space we have available.
More of the fields have been worked. I am so far from farming now I do not recognize some of the equipment being pulled behind the tractors. The spring tooth that I see - that I know.

A few black-headed gulls still sit on the puddles. This is the first year I've noticed them. Is it the first year they've been here or the first year I've been paying attention? It's the age-old question - Is it the observer or the observed?

Thursday, April 23, 1998
Another blue sky, another day the Lord has made.

Long shadows in Fairwater and across the farmland to the north. More fields have been worked, with wide sweeps made to miss the low, wet ground. They will farm what they can.
The big tree in the middle of its field drops a dark doily on the ground. Grandma, I say doily and I think of you.

This morning at the shed near where the snowy owl had perched, two men are unloading fertilizer and preparing to put it on the field.
I keep hoping to see Mount Tom off in the distance, to the northwest in Green Lake County. My eyes are not that good. There is a ridge between here and there blocking the view. If ever I could see that far, it would be today.

Winter is over. Children walk to school with bared legs.

Friday, April 24, 1998
The president of our company is something of a bird-watcher. From my description of the black-headed gull, he suggests it is the Bonaparte gull. Its appearance here, he suggests, is "uncommon."

The trees assert themselves. Next to the garage, more daffodils, white ones to go with the yellow pair.

The pond is still. The pond is still the pond. Still the pond is.

The cemetery in Fairwater has been mowed for the first time.

Some of the fields which haven't been worked yet look as if they've got a few days' growth of beard, green beard.

This morning the hawk is in its tree in the middle of the field, ordering breakfast.

Some of the worked fields are rough still, some have been tilled to a fine consistency - any wind could put the dust of this earth into the air.
One of the fields near Five Corners looks like a mud flat. It has a notion it may dry out, but maybe it will take awhile too.

The dead deer in the ditch along Highway E between Union Street and Ripon is nearly gone - only hide and bone left, I think. As shall we all, it returns from whence it came - that primordial ooze of matter and energy in electric flux.

Monday, April 27, 1998
Rain Saturday night and Sunday morning has refreshed the earth. The sky is a washed blue this morning. Bright sun and long shadows. Leaves on the trees large enough, some of them, to block out the sky behind. Flowers shiver in the cool breeze.

Weeds in some of the fields call out for attention but the soil is still too wet to work. The grass is the ditches is thick and tough. Will it be dun-colored and sere by the end of August? What summer will the El Nino bring?

The old horse stands are the east side of its barn, warming himself in the sun. In the distance, the whiteness of a fertilizer bag caught in some brush, like a cosmic marker on the landscape.

If you don't like this level of detail, dial up a television news show, eat some cotton candy, drink decaffeinated coffee.

Tuesday, April 28, 1998
It is a beautiful morning. It is a beautiful day to note that the two very first daffodils are spent. They have closed for the last time - crumpled, we might say instead. For them, spring has come and gone. For the rest of us, a cool morning, a still pond, a hazy cloud cover.
The grass in our lawn is already shaggy. Across the street, a squirrel and a robin inspect a lawn.

Kweek kweek kweek goes the speedometer cable of the pick-up, singing like a bird.

The drivers of two on-coming vehicles in succession look sad or angry or ungodly serious - why even bother to get up, ladies, if things are so bad?

In the low spot where we saw the Bonaparte gulls, the water is receding remarkably now. Overnight, it seems, it has moved back from the edge twelve feet or more. At Five Corners there is still a small rivulet in the ditch, only a faint memory of its former self.

To the northwest, vaguely, there is a low cloud that looks like smoke dissipating.

Wednesday, April 29, 1998
I am looking at the restaurant section in the travel guide for Quebec City. I think "There sure are a lot of French restaurants in this town." Then - duh - I think - Duh, Tom, this is Quebec. The people have created the place. I wonder whether and how the place influenced the people.

I saw egrets last night, and herons.

A very little black paint, some water, white paper - clouds are painted on the morning sky.
Along the garage, one tulip thinks about opening.

The Grand River still runs higher than usual, though not so fiercely as earlier this spring.
There is a raccoon dead on the road. As a species, I think, raccoons have the reaction time of rocks. I like raccoons, they may be intelligent, but they have no common sense. Well, I suppose that's not entirely fair - squirrels aren't much smarter about roads. Crows have about the most road sense of any creature I've seen.

I have said that, in the rain, Ripon looks like an old town. In this gray light, this morning, she looks like an old lady.

Although it is somewhat cool this morning, the young nubbins walking to school have bared their legs. Obviously, then, it cannot snow again this season.

Thursday, April 30, 1998
As I walked last night, I noted how much progress farmers have been making in their fields. The tractors roared toward darkness, the land is tamed once again.

It is a foggy morning. The sun is a wet coin. The dome of grey reduces visibility to less than half a mile. The blades of grass bend with the weight of the morning's moisture.

The hawk is in its tree, hungry I presume.

At the low spot where we saw the Bonaparte gulls, the water has receded even more. Now every cornstalk is revealed.

For the first time this year, the old man is out to work his flower beds at Five Corners. He has been there in years past, spending a lot of time caring for his flowers. He walks there now, cigar clenched in his teeth, watering can in his hands.

On Watson Street in Ripon, a middle school student crosses in front of me. She dribbles a basketball, ambles towards school with parts all askew as is typical for that age. The way she has her baseball cap pulled down, you know she's serious about her basketball, you know she doesn't want any guff. Her timing, crossing the street, is good - I don't have to slow even the least bit for her. In my rearview mirror, I see her dribble her way onto the cross street, still serious, her parts still askew.

Friday, May 1, 1998
May Day - a wet, dripping, gray day. The month comes in much like the winter was, like a sponge with water, waiting for someone to squeeze. Warm water, I might add, for it is a warm morning. The grey sky belies the mildness of the day.

Rain and fog in the country. The school bus stops in front of me at the Sina pig farm. The greyness rolls away in waves. The black soil is a strong contrast. Two large seagulls swim through the air. There is water back where water had been.

Seven cars at Five Corners - a traffic jam!
A crow pecks at the remains of the deer carcass in the ditch along Highway E between Union Street and Ripon. Perhaps the rain has softened the leathery toughness.

At several places along Watson Street, tulips stand at attention. If they could, they'd march in their own May Day Parade. They are the day's only color.

Monday, May 4, 1998
I drove to Iowa over the weekend via backroads, passing through small farming communities in both Wisconsin and Iowa. They called out to me, they said "Tell my stories...." There would be a lot of stories to tell, I'm sure; they would be stories of family, of hardship, of endurance. Looking at Iowa, I get the sense the land is reclaiming itself. A lot of farm houses abandoned already, or near abandonment. A lot of fences have been torn down. A ragged roll to the land as if it is healing itself, as if it is coiling to expel these European invaders, these white men. Well - actually - I'm sure it's too late for that.

Dew sparkles in the morning light. A pair of sparrows mate in the street. A bright sun. The village enjoys its quiet morning.

White siding is going up on that house on Highway 44 downtown. In places, the original clapboard has been revealed and shows itself still. It will soon disappear.

The hawk is in its tree; all is right with the world.
Farmers have been busy over the weekend. More fields have been tilled. Some fields have been planted. Good black dirt.

Yellow-headed dandelions in the ditches, in a couple of fields. They are shouting orders. You put them under a girl's chin - if the skin of her throat reflects the yellow, she will marry a farmer.

Oh, if life were so simple. If we could be sure they'd stay married.

Tuesday, May 5, 1998
Man is a territorial animal. Is that because he is greedy, or is it for legitimate reasons of survival. We in the United States have taken line and section and town to a high art. Surveying is a quintessential human skill, to mark what's mine from what's yours.

What's yours this morning is a wet, grey day, wet streets. I would have sunshine.

Yesterday I failed to note that the tulip had opened. I had not noticed it. Even when you say you shall watch the world around you, you don't. Tom, you sometimes go off half ready, lacking the mindfulness you'd require of others. Pay attention or shut up.

Stillness. Perhaps that is what I love about village life. The quiet pond. Real birds. An empty street. Lazy days. We live, we love, we die. Life goes on - no one gets very excited. Peace is found in accepting the cycle of things. Stress comes when we try to hi-jack or short-circuit things out of the normal order of life. The happy man is the patient man.

It is something of a dark day in the country. The hawk is in its tree. The small orchard at the farmstead just north of Carter Road is in blossom. An explosion of white. White on the trees like snow on pines in a Christmas card.
The large, wet area along Highway E where we'd seen the gulls is now nearly devoid of water, despite last night's rain. It is not yet ready to farm, but soon. Soon.

Wednesday, May 6, 1998
Last evening as I took garbage out to the curb, I noticed three more tulips open in the bed along the garage. Were they open yesterday in the morning? Did I fail to notice them? Do I see only what I expect to see, am I blind to everything else? How can I begin to consider myself an observant man, a true "witness" to this life, if such things escape my notice?

It is a foggy, foggy morning. I have noticed that, at least. I can barely discern the outline of a neighbor's garage across the street. Visibility is less than thirty yards.

The cemetery in Fairwater has been mowed for the second time.

It is too foggy to see the hawk's tree this morning, much less the hawk in the tree. The sun does a slow burn, seeking attention.
The blindness today is both literal and metaphorical. Except there is no blindness in Ripon. I can see down the length of Watson Street. I can see the sun shining. I have always said the town kids have it easier.

Thursday, May 7, 1998
A slow rain, this morning. A mourning dove sits on the driveway, getting wet - a picture of acceptance.

"This Door Is NOT in Use" the sign says, on a house in Fairwater.

Brick has been laid where the Harmsen porch had been. Is it the foundation for another porch, or for something else?

A grey day in the country. The strobe light atop a school bus gets noticed. Rain on the windshield all the way to Ripon.

There is a skunk on the road, wet and dead.
At the Sina pig farm, a girl waits for the school bus. Her hair is wet. She tosses her head to flip her hair out of her eyes. Her brother waits with her - they do not stand in the shelter at the end of the driveway, but under the dripping trees.

Most of the fields along the way have been worked to a fine, smooth consistency.

Friday, May 8, 1998
The long view: a very mild winter, a moist spring. Both the result, I'm assuming, of the El Nino. Wisconsin is carpeted thick and green following such mildness and moisture. It is a beautiful world by comparison to some harsh, ugly, reluctant springs I have known. We should take joy in the beauty of this season's world.
There are so many times we get caught up in the details, overwhelmed by the minutiae, that we overlook the true beauty in the sweep of things. Cannot see the forest for the trees, as they say. Cannot enjoy the loveliness because of a small blemish. Perspective is a wonderful thing, if you can find it. Why is it so difficult to find? We really are trapped in our own little orb of skull bone, aren't we? The elephant confined by a ten foot piece of chain can pace only a distance of ten feet, even after the chain has been removed. What must we do to set ourselves free of our own such tethers?

The white daffodils are spent. The peonies have shot up and become very bushy. Some of the tulips bend towards their end. The lilies of the valley have a notion they'll open soon, to release their sweet perfume. It is a sunny morning, a little cool but bright. Send the whiners home - this will be a good day.

Another explosion of blossoms in the orchard at Weinkauf's, just north of Fairwater.

Where is the hawk taking breakfast this morning? I do not see him.

Women with severe faces in the oncoming traffic. I don't suppose they'd listen to an argument that "not enough sex is the true cause of war." No? I didn't think so.

Monday, May 11, 1998
We had a wonderful weekend and the week is starting out lovely too. Blue sky and bright sun. Grass is green and thick. The birds are calling. Charge, I say. Charge!

Long shadows of the morning sun - this is almost a morning made for cutting hay. I know, I know - it is too early in the season.

The hawk is not in his tree; and there are now nearly enough leaves on the tree that I might not see him even if he were. In the evening, he likes to sit on one or the other poles of the powerline along the highway, just south of the grove of trees I call his home.

A few fields are green with crops. It is peas which have sprouted. Some fields have not yet been worked at all and they are turning green with weeds. Dandelions have turned to fluff, gone to seed for the first time this season.

At the farm near Five Corners - a baby donkey taking suck.

North of Union Street along Highway E, it is corn - I think - that has just barely sprouted.
Today must be bulky article pick-up in Ripon. The streets are lined with couch and bookshelf and end table and all manner of cast-off. The ritual of spring is playing out here, now. Where and when did the impulse originate? And why? And how has it been transmuted?

Tuesday, May 12, 1998
The morning ritual. I rise about 5:00 a.m. and work at writing for two hours. At 7:00 a.m. I start my shower for work, dress as a businessman, sort of. Putting on coat and tie for me is very much like the priest putting on chasuble and stole. Similar symbolism. Then I drive to work, taking note of my morning thoughts along the way. In the parking lot at the printing plant, I sit for a bit while I record those observations. Some would look at me askance as I sit there, scribbling. Screw 'em if they can't take a joke.

This morning is no different. Blue sky and bright sun. A wonderful day in May. I will spoil it by going to work. The need to make a living keeps us on the straight and narrow, doesn't it? The owner is a good man, but a Republican. His challenge is to make money on his money. That is not my challenge - although I do want him to succeed. My challenge is the juggling, the puzzle, the making of something excellent where nothing had been before. It is different than the money impulse, isn't it?

A still pond. The call of the mourning dove. Morning dove. Good morning, dove. Morning, love.

Fairwater is a trim and tidy village. Mowed lawns. Colorful flower beds. Houses that are cared for. Ah, there - a rusted out automobile.
North of town - another field has sprouted, in green rows. Is it corn or beans? And there - another one. 'Tis the season.

The pattern of tractor and planter in the soil is some massive artwork, isn't it?

A new calf stands on new legs in the pasture of cows and donkeys just south of Five Corners. Farther north, a farm wife drives a tractor pulling a flat rack. She has covered her hair with a scarf. She is in the field picking up rocks. This is a task that never ends. You think you have them all, then over the winter some wicked elf spreads more on your fields. Is this a picture of hell?

Wednesday, May 13, 1998
Another fine day, after a little rain last night. The mourning dove flies from our driveway. The wind ruffles the surface of the pond. Blue sky. Here we go.

Great piles of stone have been dumped in the canning factory's field north of town. Perhaps they will put stone along the paths of the tires of their irrigation unit.

The field of peas is already thick green. There is a hint of corn in another field. Blossoms are off the trees in the orchard of the farmstead north of Carter Road. The old horse is out to the far end of his pasture this morning. This is not usual. What is it a portent of?

The fields south of Five Corners are still wet, still untilled. The weeds overtake them.

Thursday, May 14, 1998
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. We have had a warm winter and a moist spring. Will August be dry, the green grasses seared? Will autumn be a long chilly nightmare? No matter - today is bright and blue of sky.

I noticed last night a SOLD sign on the house along E north of Five Corners where the car had driven through the ditch onto the lawn last winter. It didn't take long to sell, did it? I'm told divorce is the reason it went on the market again so soon after it sold the first time. I suggested that the process of building a house might bring a couple to divorce.

Mourning doves in the driveway again. Lilacs are opening at Weinkauf's, just north of Fairwater. I haven't seen the hawk for several days. Should I worry?

A faint haze in the distance, noticeable especially to the east.

The fellow is working his flower beds at Five Corners. A floppy hat, today. No cigar. Yet.
There are several fields south of Five Corners which haven't been worked yet, including some on high ground with corn rubble. Do not worry too soon, Tom. It is early in the season.

Friday, May 15, 1998
It is the middle of May already, and nearly five months since I started keeping this morning drive journal. It is another fine day, with thunderstorms promised for late in the afternoon or evening. It is too early to gauge the worth of what I record here, except perhaps to express amazement: (1) that I am faithful to the task; and (2) that there is anything still to be said. I do watch the weather, the fields, my hawk. I am watching low spots recover from this wetness. I watch the birds - call of the robin, sound of mourning dove flying from my driveway. The flowers. The color of grass. None of this is of earth-shattering importance; much of it is of no importance at all. But it is real. And what I have learned - that I don't see very well, that there are things I miss even as I look right at them. And this is when I want to see. Think about the people who hurry past in their daily rush - how much do they miss? Does it matter?

The tall grass is being cut into windrows in the field where the canning company sprays its waste water. There is haze in the distance - what you think of when you say "Canada," "early morning," "looking out across a roll of wilderness."

Is that my hawk flying two miles north of its usual haunts? It has the right coloration but maybe is not quite big enough.

It is amazing how fast the fields planted to crops have been turning green.

At Five Corners, the fellow is working his flower beds again. He's wearing a baseball cap today, not a floppy hat. He is a barrel of a man, like a retired farmer or factory worker, not at all what you'd expect to see tending flowers but here nonetheless.

Monday, May 18, 1998
A hot day yesterday. The night air has cooled us. Some more heat expected today. Mary says they are predicting hot and mugging for today. We have blue sky and bright sun, so summer-like weather is certainly possible.
We are expecting a friend to visit tonight or tomorrow. He's leaving Boston, heading for San Francisco. He's a younger man, so the extreme wrenching that change of address requires will not affect him so much as it might someone of my age and my midwestern temperament. He is adventuresome to a greater degree than a settled man like myself.

A quiet morning in the village. Long shadows. North on Highway E, a dead cat; farther on, a raccoon, dead. Two blackbirds harass a crow.
There are only a few fields that are not showing signs of one crop or another. The fields south of Five Corners are still chief among those that haven't been worked.

It is Monday. It is the start of the work week. You might also say it is the start of summer.
Ripon is a city with trees. They arch over Watson Street like a cathedral's ceiling. Let us pray. Let us thank God for this most amazing day.

Tuesday, May 19, 1998
A cool, blue sky this morning. It was a hot day yesterday - for May - and will be a warm one again today. El Nino? A natural cycle of some other kind? As I like to say: "If it's not 30 degrees below zero, you won't hear me complain too much."

There may have been rain last night but it couldn't have been much. Clouds roll away to the east.

In the farmyard where wild geese had paddled in a pool of standing water earlier in the season now there is neatly trimmed lawn.
I head north on Highway E. The smell of pigs is strong in the morning air. It smells like money to an Iowa farm boy. Farther on, where we'd seen the geese and the Bonaparte gulls gather in a large, low, wet spot, the farmer has worked the ground, finally dry enough. In other fields, such low spots have been carved out and left untilled.

On the radio we're told government officials fear that whatever is destroying amphibians world-wide may also affect humankind. Duh.

Wednesday, May 20, 1998
Clay Pameter takes his garbage out to the curb in front of the C&D Bar. He turns and waves. One of the Stellmachers stands talking in front of the lumberyard. He and his brother were much younger men when we moved into Fairwater. So was Clay Pameter.

Another raccoon is sprawled dead on the road north of town.

Once again the horse is grazing at the north end of its pasture. I don't know what that means.

Thursday, May 21, 1998
Another lovely morning. The peonies are heading out; some are showing a little of the color. Soon the ants will come to open them. Usually this is in June, here along the garage, but it may be a little earlier this year.

Birds in the morning - they are as single-minded as water. All that empty sky and they are challenged to fill it with sound. They try, mightily.

The land is clearly and proudly farm country this morning - fields worked smooth, crops sprouted, sun on black soil and green plant. A field thick with peas, near the pole where sat the snowy owl. Corn four inches tall.

A few fields near Five Corners still have not been worked at all.

North of Five Corners, a skunk dead on the road. Farther on, a dead possum. The night has not been kind.

Crows are boastful fellows, even to the way they walk.

Friday, May 22, 1998
How long it's been since I've had to scrape ice off the windshield. After these days of very warm weather, the cool breeze this morning is refreshing - almost as if one is stepping out of the cabin overlooking a far Canadian lake. A smell that is fresh, a day that is new. How do they live in the smog of their cities, those who choose to?

Blackbirds flirt and do their mating flutter at the curb on Main Street.

Far to the North, clouds blow through. They are the edge of someone else's cloudy day.

Dandelions have gone to seed. Roadside ditches need mowing. Lawns around the farm houses have been clipped close, like the farm boy's summer butch.

Is that the red of geranium in the flower beds at Five Corners? Certainly looks so.

A pick-up is pulling boat and trailer; and a couple of fellows are thinking about fish.
The radio tells us about the boy in Oregon who opened fire on his school mates. "Voted most likely to start World War III by his peers." The joke is not so funny now, as they clean up blood in the cafeteria. Not so funny at all.

Tuesday, May 26, 1998
I saw the hawk Friday evening on my way home from work, the first time in a while I've seen it. It was circling above its grove. It was being harassed by two blackbirds. One of them was flying into its face, as if trying to peck at its eyes.

Can we speak about place without speaking of the people of the place? If we do not speak about the people of the place and their relationship to the land, then are we speaking about wilderness? There is an exchange between the land and the people on the land which tells an interesting part of the story of a place. We bend the grass and take down the trees and change the shape of the hills. The land feeds and sustains us. Isn't it wonderful that the fruit of the earth tastes good to us, nourishes us. Apples could just as easily have been bitter as sweet.

Think of the Sandhills of Nebraska, their harshness and the difficulty that Old Jules had establishing an orchard there. That piece of ground did not easily wish to give back. Old Jules wrestled with it and wrestled with it and even today, a century later, it is difficult to say that man has won that struggle. It is still a bitter and harsh and lovely ground and the lives of those who choose to remain there are not easy lives.

The peonies in the back yard are opening, white. Those in front of the garage are still tight balls.

The first crop of hay has been taken already along Highway E north of town. Some rain on Sunday has helped the peas and corn and the weeds between the rows of corn.

Another baby donkey, wobbly-kneed and new, at the farm south of Five Corners. No one has worked the fields of corn stubble west and south of there.

School will soon be out. May is nearly spent, like a blossom dropping its petals.

Wednesday, May 27, 1998
These mornings on this familiar ground I am the farthest imaginable from being a stranger in a strange land. And yet as much as I know about the roll and swoop of this ground, there is also much I do not know. I don't know the families who farm these fields, and the families before them, all the way back to the Indians.
Granted, it is near impossible to gather certain kinds of historical information, as I well know. Still, can I pretend to speak with any authority on this morning as I drive if I have little clue who these people are, who those who came before them were? Will this essential ignorance doom my effort?

In front of the garage, three peonies have opened, pink and heavy. Another bud is ready to. All of these are on the end of the peony bed closest to the morning sun.

The pond has had a layer of scum and algae on it for several days. The still water is not very pretty this morning.

I cannot go on saying how lovely the village is in morning light. There! The post mistress raises our flag in front of the post office.
The corn fields definitely need cultivating. El Nino has been kind to weeds as well as crops.
If Boeing can't make planes fast enough, how can it be losing so much money? What is wrong there? If Boeing goes down, it doesn't bode well for the economy.

Thursday, May 28, 1998
A storm this morning - long, low roar of thunder; rain. Lightning reflected off windows across our driveway. The farmers will appreciate the rain. So will the little green, growing creatures in the farmers' fields.

Tires spit moisture from the street, leave tracks so you can see where they've been. A different song today, sung in a different key. Would the farmers take a rest, clean out their tool sheds, grease their equipment?

You can run away from home, but you can't run very far. What made you keeps you. A farmer's son is always a farmer's son. Cut yourself, Tom, do you not bleed green?

The peony blossoms are bent low with the weight of rain on them.

The pond is dimpled.

In places the road ahead mirrors the sky above. Grey, wet road. Grey, wet sky. Electric moisture. The clouds do not say we are at the edge of an ocean, nor even a very large lake. That takes different clouds.

Heavy rain. At the Sina pig farm, children in their rain coats slick and shiny wait for the school bus, which is not far behind me.
At Five Corners - white and purple flowers close to the ground to the southeast; peony blossoms on their bushes to the northwest.

Friday, May 29, 1998
Yesterday turned hot and steamy once the clouds cleared away. Another thunderstorm rolled through last night and cooled things off. The sky is grey still. Our peonies are bent with the weight of the moisture that remains.

To the north and northwest, the sky looks cold and wintry, like cloudy ice cubes.

There has been great progress made to the addition to the farm house a mile south of Five Corners - a large garage and more space for the second floor. The house looks twice as large now, and it was a big house to start with.
Equipment sits on the empty lot next to the house that sold recently. A man looks over some papers, looks over the lot. Will he be digging a basement today? Is there another house going up on good farm land? Will we ever reclaim what we are losing? Does anybody care?

The radio wants to talk about pain in places all across the planet. I have to turn it off. There is enough pain right here, right now.

Monday, June 1, 1998
While we were out of town over the weekend, high winds - as heavy as 70 mph - moved through Wisconsin. The only damage in Fairwater seems to be the very large, very old, very punky silver maple that stood at the corner of Mary's mother's property. Fortunately when it blew down it fell into the empty lot between Mary's mother's house and the neighbor's. No one was injured. Power was out for the neighbor's for about 12 hours, however.

Some cornfields have water standing in them this morning. Some need cultivating badly. The fields of peas are thick and green.

Between Five Corners and Union Street, the basement for the new house has been dug, as I had expected. A school kid rides his bike towards town in the wrong lane, then veers back into my lane right in front of me. I hit the brakes to avoid hitting him. Life is short enough without such recklessness. Or conversely, life is too short not to be reckless.
A bright sun, a fresh day, a new month - and no indication in the air that storms had rolled through here on the weekend. The day throbs, innocent as the fair-skinned girl in her white dress in full sunlight with mischief on her mind.

Tuesday, June 2, 1998
Our peonies are playing themselves out. Everything is early. Heat in the waters of the Pacific Ocean affects us. Everything is connected, isn't it? We can think regional if we wish, but we cannot forget the global perspective. Air and water, winds and tides connect us. The dust of Dustbowl, Montana, sets down in Depression, Wisconsin.

The siding on the house being worked on along Highway 44 in downtown Fairwater is now nearly completed. Work on the Harmsen porch continues; it will be a porch.

Grey skies.

Indeed they have been placing stones in the tracks of the irrigation rig in the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water. There are working there again this morning.

The radio says the Wisconsin travel season has started earlier than usual this year, due, it is suggested, to the warm El Nino spring. Everything is connected, isn't it?

The corn has grown amazing inches over the past week - some of it is nearly a foot tall already.

A big blast of peonies at Five Corners - red and pink and white. They blaze in full glory, wave uneasily in the wind.

What they want is choice, the radio says of high school students in their cafeterias. What they get is the same ol' fast food - hamburgers and tacos and pizza. Chinese, Thai, Indian, Afghani, Greek, German food, now that would be the start of choice. Junk food for the tummy, junk for the mind. There are way too many overweight people in this country, victims of the mighty dollar. You have to go out of your way to eat healthy foods these days. Where was it that we went off track?

Is this enough of Fat Man preaching?

Wednesday, June 3, 1998
Preparing to leave this place for a ten day journey is more a mental task than a physical one. I will be leaving behind a landscape I know familiarly, that I observe closely, and that I love dearly. It is not hat I fear strangers, for most of my neighbors are strangers to me - I am not a gregarious fellow and do not go out of my way to meet those who live close to me. My Chinese birth chart says I will have only a few, deep friendships. Yes, I will be leaving behind a few friends, but that's part of life and has never been its burden. Partly, I will be leaving behind my familiar daily routine - rising early to work on the book, showering for work, the morning meditation on the drive north, the close look at the changeless/changing land, a good day's work, a walk after work, sweet sleep. A pleasant enough existence left behind. I will have to endure hours in the car, lines of people, rude behavior perhaps, a foreign language - these jerk my out of my comfort.

Still, it will be refreshing - I will see a landscape I have never seen and will be able to come back and view this landscape with new eyes as a result of the experience.

The field of winter rye along Highway E north of Fairwater is starting to head out. A field of soybeans shows itself.

It's cool this morning. Clouds are blanked to the east, to the west; there is a layer of grey overhead.

All three of the baby donkeys are at pasture just south of Five Corners. They will watch my world for me while I am gone.

Monday, June 15, 1998
You cannot see home the same once you've left and come back. What you've seen changes what you can see.

We are more alike than we are different. If pushed to do so, I could name only a few differences in people from here compared to those of northern Indiana and Ohio; Pennsylvania and New York; Niagara Falls, Ontario and Quebec, Quebec. Those of Quebec speak French, or French and English; their clock runs slower - by that I mean that even in heavy traffic they are never in a hurry, they are always courteous, they make way for a car to break into line rather than jealously protecting their place. They are largely a smaller and darker people - the French genetic influence, no doubt. But contrary to what we had heard, they were very pleasant and humorous and helpful. I must say it is disconcerting to order food from a girl at a fruit and vegetable stand in the country who looks all the world to be entirely Irish and find she speaks French only and not a word of English - there should be a brogue with that red hair and those freckles, those teasing blue eyes. There goes a stereotype, eh? The pace of Quebec definitely was slower than the pace here, and we definitely think of ourselves as more bucolic than, say, New York City.

In Quebec and Ontario - Ottawa to Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie - we saw rock, exposed Canadian shield - great city-sized chunks of it. The land was green even on much of the rock and gravel. Here and there we saw farms - especially on the Isle of Orleans in the St. Lawrence - but nothing with soil as rich as ours, nothing so relentlessly green as Wisconsin is right now.

Woke to the familiar sound of my own bird songs this morning - the reassuring sound of Fairwater at daybreak.

Our peonies are mostly spent.

It is 6:50 a.m. as I leave for work - long shadows in the village.

It is very definitely summer now - corn a foot tall or more, blossoms on the peas, the field of winter rye fully headed out, the ditches full with grass.

There are all sorts of peonies and violets abloom at Five Corners. It is good to be home.

Tuesday, June 16, 1998
A clear, cool morning. Dew on the grass. The conversation of birds. Peaceful village. I hate to leave for work when the world is this placid and lovely.

The re-siding of the house downtown along Highway 44 has been completed - bright white. The Harmsen porch is finished, I notice - new steps, new floor, new roof. Only the air is the same.

All but one pile of stone in the canning factory's field has been used up to make track for the irrigation rig. The one remaining pile sits bright and mute in the morning sun.

Out in the country, there is a bit of haze in the distance - the humidity is high.

The fields south of Five Corners that had been untilled are still untilled. Some things are certain.

The foundation for the house on the lot between Five Corners and Union Street has been poured, as I predicted. Now, farther north between Union Street and the city, a For Sale sign has gone up on an old house on the east side of the road. I expect it will take a while to sell.

Wednesday, June 17, 1998
A little rain last night, a bright and beautiful Wisconsin morning today. Yesterday was warm - mid 80s - and today should be as well. Dew on the grass. The pond is calm, with algae floating. A new house going up down the hill from us, a ugly sore - where the flood of 1989 had washed out a 30 foot hole in the soil. What will be will be. People have strange ideas of what is beautiful, what is necessary. If I complain about everything I dislike, I won't have time for the things I like.

The foundation is being poured for another house in the development behind the Village Mart.

A very weedy field of corn just north of town. Growing up in Iowa we judged a man's character by how clean he kept his fields. It's a moral thing. Gasoline did not cost so much then.

I have not seen the hawk in a good long while, though I have been watching for him.

Some of the fields of corn are so thick now that you cannot see the soil between the rows. The soy beans are coming along well. The peas are pretty much done blossoming and are making pods.

Corn is finally sprouting in the field that had the large pool of water standing in it much of the spring. Little spikes of corn plants, only, but they are up and green across the entire field.
In Ripon, at the corner of the house where the dog has been chained outside at times during the winter and spring, a circular carpet of grass much greener than the rest of the lawn.

On days like this I sometimes think I am a monster-beast restrained by Germanic convention. It would be a good day to be wild. I go to work instead.

Thursday, June 18, 1998
Only one peony bloom left along the garage - the rest are broken and brown. The peony season is over for us.

It is a cool, blue morning, but will be hot again as yesterday was. Perhaps some haze of humidity in the air.

Tomorrow morning we will be on our way to Missoula, Montana, across a landscape far different this one - no trees - into a landscape even more different - mountains. The beauty of home is that you get to go away. The beauty of going away is that you get to come home.

The winter rye looks like it is thinking about turning color - it is no longer green exactly.
Two power poles along Highway E have been split and broken. The cross bars are dangling. A power company truck is there, with a man investigating. What happened? Lightning? It doesn't look like a lightning strike but I can't imaging what else could tear the cross bars loose. Wind? A storm rolled through last night, but didn't seem that windy. There are puddles of rain still at the south edge of Ripon and in town there are branches down. Still garbage cans sit in place and haven't been blown around.

Sunday, June 23, 1998
Summer. A trip west, to move a daughter to Missoula, Montana - 1223 miles from the Twin Cities. Observations made along the way:

o There is a surfeit of snowy peaks only 950 miles west of the Twin Cities.

o Big Sky is true - the horizon is farther off. How is that possible? How can the earth appear to fall away in the distance even as it seems to rise up?

o There are a lot of ways to look at the land: the farmer says "If you can't farm it, what good is it?" But you look at the ugly scruffiness of the Canadian shield in Quebec - a gnarled land - why not exploit it? What good is it anyway? It is not wilderness, it is where God dumped the leftovers when he was done with everything else. Once it has been spoiled, how could you tell? Mary tells me the landscape around Sudbury, Ontario, is much recovered from where it had been thirty years ago when she saw it first. It still looks pretty wasted to me. Suggests there is a difference between wilderness and wasteland.

o There is a difference, seeing a land without history vs. seeing a land shaped by the hands and backs of its settlers. A land without history is somehow less attractive to me. I am, I believe, a "people-based" observer of landscape, rather than "wildlife-based" or "landform-based." So am I at root an historian rather than a geologist?

o At home we can watch a thunderstorm roll in across a great sweep of land. Out here, I am watching a storm swirl around the mountains, almost as if it is caught and cannot break itself free.

o Do we have a need to see pattern or repetition on the landscape? Is this the reason for our grid pattern laid all across the midwest? Has the land been tamed once it has been so marked?

o Clouds just clear the top of the buttes - as if the clouds brushing against peaks have worn them flat.

o The wildlife or wilderness experience is only one form of relationship with the land. There are many others. Some, for instance:
- The cropping relationship of the farmer, husbanding for continued, long-term use.
- The extractive relationship of the miner, taking what is to be had and moving on.
- The sheer observational relationship of the passing tourist who makes no investment whatsoever and then having seen what there is to see moves on to another landscape.
- The preservationist relationship, insisting on keeping the land as it is.
What other relationships do we have with the land?

o The mountains are catching the clouds, like a child dragging his blanket.

o How you look at the land depends upon how you look at the Genesis charge to have dominion over the animals of the earth. In contrast, we can take an ecological view; as with reincarnation in Eastern religion, we are part of it, not apart from it. Perhaps that is a fundamental question to ask oneself: am I part of it or am I apart from it - how you answer determines whether you think you can have dominion over animals, whether you can colonize other peoples, whether you can rape the land for personal gain.

o I think about my daughter's cat, which has made the trip with me in this truck. It is a "house cat," staying inside in the Twin Cities, staying in the truck across 1200 miles of the Great American Desert, staying in an apartment in Missoula. From this position, the cat has no relationship at all with the land around it, no engagement. The farmer, the hunter, the explorer, they are engaged with the land. Is the tourist? Is the urban dweller?

o What kind of relationship to nature does the urban dweller have - separated from the dirt by a layer of concrete, separated from the sky by the buildings around it. In no sense can the heat rising from the black asphalt be compared to heat from the desert floor; wind swirling around skyscrapers is not wind coming off the mountains.

Thursday, June 25, 1998
Whitefish, Montana. We board Amtrack for the Twin Cities at 9:30 a.m. local time - two hours late. The locals are not surprised the train is late.

We have left behind a daughter who is starting graduate school here in recreational resource management. To look at this land - we are only miles from Glacier National Park - there are plenty of recreational resources to manage. We have left behind the daughter who wants to be a mountain rescue ranger - there are mountains hereabouts, but I wonder how many jobs to support a volunteer rescue ranger.
The train is two hours late. Doesn't matter to me. It is light out now and we can see river and mountain and the clouds banging their bellies.

Some observations about Montana:
o There are mountain girls and there are cow girls - they look different, they walk different, they talk different. One wears hiking boots, the other cowboy boots. The mountain girls are a little thicker muscled, especially in the legs. The cowgirls wiggle more when they walk.

o There are, apparently, a lot more smokers in Montana - at least we see a lot more of them than we do on average in Wisconsin.

o There are more drifters and homeless people in Missoula than I would expect - and some of them look pretty weathered and grizzled. You think maybe they got as far as the Rockies then couldn't make it over the mountains. A natural barrier for the drifters to blow up against, the way Key West is as far as they can blow in the tropical direction.

o Cottonwood trees in Missoula were sending out enough fluff to make a quilt for a very large bed. It drifted into piles a foot deep along some buildings.

o I didn't say this - my wife and daughter did - all the women in Montana are pretty good looking. We did not see near so many obese folks as we would in Wisconsin or Minnesota.

o They have way more than their fair share of mountains around here and should send a few to central Wisconsin.

o The houses on the Flathead Indian Reservation north of Missoula are trim and well cared for. Some awfully pretty scenery lies within the reservation's boundary.

More.

The train came through Marias Pass and - BOOM - just like that we are out of the mountains and onto the high plains. The snow covered Rockies rise up like dark storm clouds behind us. There are ranches with horses, fields with tractors working their way across them. The land has a sensuous roll to it and is very much greener than I imagine it will be in August. Missoula has had an unusual amount of moisture this year and I suppose the same is true here on the highest of the plains.

Not fifteen minutes later it is possible to see only the very peaks of the mountains in the distance. They are mottled, very much like a Chinese water color. US Highway 2 runs alongside the tracks. It is 12:30 p.m. local time. We are #13 in line waiting for lunch in the diner car.

Then - all of a sudden - the mountains show themselves again - a great long range of them stretching to the south as far as I can see. Bam Bam Bam the clouds bang into them.

You can still see the Rockies from Cut Bank. They stretch on and on. Don't they go all the way to the tip of South America?

During lunch we watch the Rockies disappear behind us. Then a few cones of mountains to the north, a few more at great distance to the south.

We sat at lunch with a wonderful elderly couple from Highland Park, Illinois. They were returning from a trip to Vancouver, B.C., to visit a daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren. She had a stroke last year and moves slowly as the aisles of the train are not wide enough for her walker. He has retired "six or seven times" and is still doing some teaching and administration at Trinity Seminary off Highway 41/294 at Highway 22 north of Chicago. He has a master's in theology. His parents were Ohio farm stock. He graduated from Ashland College. She was born in New York. They must be in their 80s. They were wonderful companions for our meal and I would look forward to another meal with them any time.

Here on the high plains, it must be tough country in which to make a living. Farmsteads visible along the tracks are not well cared for - by Wisconsin standards at least. There are places that look like trailer trash, outbuildings unpainted and falling apart, old cars rusting. Nothing looks permanent - rather it looks like it has been temporary for fifty years. An overwhelming untidiness, at least for a German. What was it the woman from Moose Jaw told me years ago - her friends had traveled in the USA as far as Indiana (to a James Dean Festival!) and could not believe how tidy Americans kept their farmsteads. Well, this Montana country looks a lot like that part of Canada.

The train rolls on - top speed is 79 miles per hour so likely we will never make up the two hours the train is behind schedule. The land just rolls away into the big sky.

At Havre, it starts to look as if we are coming into badlands, with a rough roll to the land. The Indians used to drive buffalo off the cliffs about town.

East out of Havre, a whole range of peaks to the south. We are on the high plains here, but those are not high plains there. A little farther east, the peaks appear to be much nearer. There are very dark, thick, grey clouds in the sky above them. And then, suddenly, the range ends abruptly and is replaced with what looks like a flat-topped plateau overlooking a wide plain below. Still the Great American Desert is greener than you'd reasonably expect. There are even trees in places, long groves of them.

In the Bear Paw Mountains east of Havre is where Chief Joseph surrendered. It was Chief Joseph who said: "From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." Would that he had been speaking not only for the Nez Perce but also for the rest of humankind.
Further east, a couple small peaks, like a hiccup on the landscape, and then another ridge starts up.

Rain in the distance. Now it is difficult to know what we are seeing to the south - everything fades into the grey curtain.

This travel by train is the life for me - I am sitting back with my feet up watching America unroll like a spool of film.

East of Malta, the landscape has really been roughed up. Though there is some farming, much of the land is used for grazing. Rolling land, flat-topped buttes as we head east towards the Fort Peck Dam and, farther on, the Missouri Breaks. Grey sky and a darkness like dusk, only it is still 5:15 p.m. Mountain Time as we head into Glasgow, Montana. We are nearing the eastern edge of the Mountain Time Zone, but that does not explain the dimness of the sky above. Thick grey paint has been spilled over the dome of sky. I cannot imagine, simply cannot imagine crossing this land in a wagon, not one drawn by oxen, not one drawn by horses. This iron charger eats up the miles, but even so eight hours after boarding we are still in Montana. You could damn near drive across Europe in eight hours, couldn't you?

Between Glasgow and Wolf Point, six antennas are set upon a distant ridge to the south. We suppose they are radio antennas beaming away their signal into the low grey sky.

In Wolf Point, a boy standing on a gravel street throws stones at the train entering the station. Well, in Wolf Point, saying "the train entering the station" is perhaps exaggeration. High cheek bones, broad noses, bronze skin of one couple departing from the train here suggests an Indian heritage. Constant reminders here about from whom the west was won.

Even farther east, in the grey evening air, a green house, an unnaturally green house I must say, on the green plain. Beyond that, to the south, the ridge that we've been running along for quite a while continues. Which river was it we could see from the train?

An old threshing machine holds down its part of the world, bound to it by rust.

During supper we saw the Missouri and the Missouri Breaks. We saw it raining "on both sides of the train this time," as a fellow passenger said. We ate with a couple from Platteville, Wisconsin. He teaches engineering at the university there. She has had bad luck with her food on the train in the past - lasagna overdone, steak too dry. Warns me that my steak will be too well done. I tell her I usually have good luck with food; and my steak was excellent. They will be getting off at Columbus.
There is blue sky out the window now. We went back to Central Time in Williston, North Dakota, as we finished supper.

The staff of the train is amazing - they have done all this thousands and thousands of times yet they make it seem fresh this time. They also do an excellent job of teaching us the ins and outs very quickly. Our attendant, a young black man, "owns" this car and wants to make sure we are satisfied; and yet he doesn't hound us.

Night descends. It won't be long and we'll be asking Henry to make up the beds in this small cubicle.

The fields are flatter for longer stretches now. The farm houses are larger. Everything looks more prosperous.

A white school house and a church, once white - they are both windowless and decaying. I'd say we are on an Indian reservation where another promise has been broken, but there are large fields of wheat and alfalfa. There are roads and powerlines. There is water. I didn't know land this good was ever set aside for reservation. (I look at a map later and see that it is not reservation land.)

The roads crossing the train tracks seem to be all gravel roads in North Dakota, few and far between. The farm houses too are few and far between. We are somewhere between Williston and Stanley, North Dakota, I believe. The sky darkens. A mile to the south, a semi moves east on US Highway 2. The ditch alongside the train is full of water for a quarter mile. A grain elevator, a lot of anhydrous ammonia tanks, a farm implement dealer with a lot full of rusting machinery, 15-20 houses. Didn't catch the name of the settlement. intercom says we are approaching Stanley and will stop there soon, so that must have been Ross, North Dakota, we passed. In the distance, a blue A.O. Smith silo. Can that be a church with a red neon light in the steeple? One if by land, two if by sea? Isn't this the part of North Dakota where there are ICBMs poised in silos, ready to right the world?

Minot, North Dakota - we step outside for a breath of fresh air before we sleep. It is after 11:00 p.m. The air is still warm, but refreshingly clear. We have our beds made up.

Thought before sleep: The system knows itself. Understand the system and use its knowledge of itself to your advantage.

Friday, June 26, 1998
Rise at 6:30 a.m. We are west of St. Cloud, Minnesota, still, but we have slept across a great swatch of North Dakota. Any form of travel is A-OK if it lets you sleep through North Dakota (or South Dakota or Nebraska, my wife would add). We have breakfast, sitting with a retired bricklayer and his wife from north of Chicago. She is unhappy with the rough sleeping, he pretty much knows how it is.

Saturday, June 27, 1998
I am driving into work for a half a day on a Saturday, to give myself a jump start on the coming week.

Now a house is going up on the foundation behind the Village Mart. The march of progress.

The canning factory is spraying waste water in its field - there is a strong stench of silage.
Farther along Highway E, a field of hay has just been taken.

Driving home yesterday just west of here we saw that fields of peas had been harvested. They have also taken a field of them here, near the pole where the snowy owl had perched.
The corn has grown amazingly in our absence. It is thigh high, waist high in places. A storm came through last night and there are wet spots in some of the fields this morning.

It looks like soy beans are up in one of the untilled fields just south of Five Corners. They are poking up through the corn stalks. No till farming, obviously.

A house has been framed where the foundation had been poured between Five Corners and Union Street.

Monday, June 29, 1998
Going back to work this morning is about more than going back to work. It is about stepping back into my customary rituals, my usual habits, about going back to dance my eternal dance. In a sense, it is reassuring - getting back to what I know. In another sense, it is confining, like stepping back into the darkness of prison.

At the very least, I shall be able to start again my morning meditation on the drive to work. I wonder how long it will take me to get comfortable with this once more. It has been very hit and miss the past month.

Oh, loud birds, birds singing in my yard. I start the pick-up. The ritual has begun. With song, with mourning dove on the driveway, with sun coming over the tree tops, long shadows.
Dew glistens on individual blades of grass.
Just north of town I see a large part of a tree is down. I had not noticed that on Saturday.

The winter rye has turned color and should be ready for harvest in two or three weeks perhaps.

A little water still stands in some of the fields. With the moisture and the heat and the humidity, you can almost hear the corn growing.

All the fields of peas along Highway E have been harvested.

Now I see soybeans up in all the untilled fields just south of Five Corners. Morning Glories are in glorious bloom in the flower beds at Five Corners.

A bicyclist between Five Corners and Union Street wears a bright tie-dyed shirt - gold like the sun, red like blood.

It is good to be home again.

Tuesday, June 30, 1998
A cool morning. We get to start the day fresh, but I suppose it will be very hot by noon again, as it has been here the past few days - or to hear other people tell it, longer than that.

Some clouds, some haze of humidity, coolness in my truck as I start the engine. I am not wearing a tie or sports coat this today - the first time since, goodness, since 1993 except for our casual dress Fridays. I just get back into my ritual, then abandon it.

I am lost in the day - in the blue sky, the white clouds, the green corn and beans - dreaming. I am halfway to Ripon before I am conscious that I have halfway to Ripon. It is a shock to recognize that I have been "in the moment" entirely - not thinking about it, just here. Then I ruin it by thinking about it, by making these notes! Isn't that the curse of the writer with his material, and the curse of the physicist trying to study wave and particle?

I lean forward to let the breeze cool my back that has grown sweaty against the seat of the pick-up. To ride the moment once again.