Friday, July 31, 2009

Where Was I ?



Yeah. Events have run over me and kept on going...so where was I before the dog died?
Talking about this trailer I'm in :
It's a "Hunter" from the forties or fifties. Years ago, it was parked down near Long Point among the squatter shacks on the strip of land between the railroad track and and the water.

Eventually they built an addition onto the trailer ; and later on, while they were building an even larger addition onto the first addition, they gave the old trailer away to a passing hippy couple in a pick-up truck.
These kids towed the trailer up into the woods in back of a local farm where they already had a little off - grid homestead, and there they attached new aluminum cladding , built authentic looking doors, and put a skylight over the trailer galley..... but then they only used it to store craft materials, , while they continued living in their little house .
Sun, rain, snow...... many moons and years blew by...... the couple split, mice moved into the trailer, the roof began to fail, and the skylight to leak..

Around then, Brother Davey was in exile from Ithaca, and in ruin from his Bed and spectacular Edgewood Place Bed and Breakfast forclosure, Had stuffed himself and his too much of his stuff into Little Nose Johnson's small traveler trailer here on his daughter's property. She has a soft spot for terailers and for him, so she let him haul the old Hunter out of the woods and set it up behind her little house on the hill.
He tried,to stop the skylight from leaking, but couldn't, so he built a cupola right over the skylight. He wanted it to be big enough so he could at least sit up there....so that's how high he made the walls.
But with the arched plexiglass roof over that, an average size adult can stand up in the center of it....and from the road, it looks like two trailers mating . It is nice up here at night though. When I was a kid, I thought the sky was a plastic dome; up here, it more or less is.

In the rear end of the trailer, Davey also built a bath-tub/bed combination....lid down it's a bed, lid up a tub. I have to give him credit for the tub bed. it suits me just fine. I always liked tubs for sleeping, and it's good to have the wet/dry option..
Then......like I said back a ways..... after he lived in the place for about a year , and, when his daughter and family moved out of the main house, he moved across the yard, leaving the trailer once again to insurgent mice and the weasels.

And now, after living for a year the Ark I made, then getting crowded out by rescue hens and living in the chicken house for a few months..... I find myself in the trailer.
But I didn't move myself in. I was moved in while unconscious.

The last thing I remembered., I'd been scything out in the orchard .

And then I was surfacing in the beforementioned bath tub which had been unused and empty of everything but mouse and weasel turds for several years.

My head was so heavy I could hardly lift it out of the water,
I looked up through the bath fog, not at clouds racing past the sun or moon, but at the blond birch paneling and a smoke detector with its mouth hanging open.

I gradually recognized where I was, but had no idea how I got there ......and who it was that I heard grinding coffee and the airy whistling on the other side of the sliding door.

And no, I didn't recognize her as she came through with the coffee.... what with the oak leaf tattooed on her cheek and blue ink maple leaves streaming down her arms .....
She knelt down by the tub and waved her chipped, maroon fingernail in front of my eyes. . Beyond the tattoos, that skin mostly big , pale freckles like shadows of floating leaves on the bottom of a stream. And that pumpkin - chanterelle hair..
She helped me sit up in the tub and she held the coffee mug to my lips.
A raft of fuzzy stuff floated on the coffee.
Rafts of the fuzzy berries in the bathtub too, Sumac berries. And the bath water was slightly pink, as if I had bled some. Maybe I had.
If I could have lifted one hand to feel my head, I would t have found the sharp lump there, but me and my hands were not yet communicating.
Then she says: You'n me........... born to be free."
That crazy rhyming habit. Makes her speech so halting, it drives me nuts.
I didn't smell he raw garlic she used to chew like gum to keep human predators off....but It had to be her, my poetry girl. I couldn't move, or hardly speak, but already I wanted to hug her and to wring her freakin frecklly neck.

2 comments:

Elizabeth Reed, Ph.D. said...

I'm glad you're started again, William. I like this part of the story, just about you. And that chaterelle-haired lovely who knows how to make coffee.

Unknown said...

dog's plot is necessary. it just is. and wm is necessary too. he just is. how old are we? how old is it? we only live for a little bit.

this not an anonymous comment.