January 19, 2024
I love Friday mornings. If you have to get up and go to work, and you work weekdays, then it’s hard not to be excited for the day. Most people in my office are in better moods, which helps make the day lighter. In Texas, today was also a “skeleton day”, which meant many people opted to take the day off for a “holiday”. Holiday. I’m not sure I understood this one from Texas. On the same week of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and all this man and movement stood for, Texas was celebrating Confederate Heroes Day, and all that it stood for. Come on, Texas. Get your shit together.
The morning started slow. My wife and I instinctively stayed close, talking and just being near each other. Next week, she’ll leave for a month, something neither of us is looking forward to. There are some perks, however. She’ll have the space she needs to work and study on a hard topic, cardio-thoracic surgery, and this will be the last rotation that we’ll be apart. So, in this sense, we’re ready to start it so we can get it done.
During my lunch break, I ran the trash to the trash service center, about two miles away. Getting the trash out of the house always feels good, and of course gets me outside into nature, or at least the backyard to pick up dog poop. With four large dogs, there is never a shortage of this raw material. It’s too bad we have not found a use for it. Horses hit the evolutionary jackpot for useful excrement. That reminds me, when I moved into this house, the previous owners had horses they left on the property, apparently unattended. When I woke up on the first morning here to go explore the property, there was horse shit everywhere, and lots of it. I shoveled the stuff for days on end and broke it down in the yard. Little did I know it was going to create a yard that grew just about anything. Now, I’m actually looking to purchase more. Lousy dogs.
After dropping off the trash, I took a detour and drove by the reservoir, pulling into the parking lot. I haven’t been out on the water for a week, since I had been sick. It was a beautiful day, and the sky looked dramatic. Thick gray and silver clouds bellowed up from the horizon while the bright sun backlit the entire scene, poking through a blue hole in the large drape. The sun’s rays shot out in every direction, moving slowly as the wind blew. On the east side, the water shimmered, but on the west side, it looked muddied, probably muddled from the stirring winds. It was good to see the reservoir, and I vowed to return over the weekend, lest the bass, crappie, catfish, and bluegills think they are safe from my rod and reel.
At last light, which now comes a whole forty-five minutes later than a month ago, I took a walk into the woods, making the loop on the trails. It would be cold tonight, the temperatures dropping into the teens. The dusky air felt damp and I could see a thin veil of fog forming inside the forest. I walked to check a trail camera pointed toward a large boulder that sits facing the creek bed. On the camera I saw a bobcat, a small family of raccoons, one opossum, and a fox. I reset the camera and continued along the trail until I arrived home.
When I returned, I grabbed a hat and my new Petzl headlamp. I snatched up a bag of deer corn from the back of my SUV and headed back into the forest. The headlamp shines up to 1100 lumens, which is insanely bright. I wondered why I did not buy one of these sooner. It made the evening deer feeding operation much easier. Because the weather was going to be so cold, I wanted to make sure the animals had enough food, so I dumped an entire bag of corn in several piles along the trail. I tried to put a decent distance between the piles since, on a trail camera, I caught a large buck warding off a small spike from the single pile of food I had previously laid down.
We had a quiet dinner and slipped into our night routine. After eating, my wife took a bath while I did the dishes. Then I took a shower and read a little before going to bed. Tomorrow, we planned to drive into Raleigh to get some supplies for my wife’s month-long stay away.
In the evening, I read a line I loved in Emerson’s essay, titled Self-Reliance. Although written long ago, I thought it applied to a modern audience. As we have all become active in social media, it has become easy to gauge one’s ideas by comparing them to a status quo that is not based in reality. Emerson reminds us of two things. First, that we have an ability to create originality particular to our own characters, and second, it is up to us to do the work with what we have. I found the following words sobering and inspiring:
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what this is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
Goodnight.