A Million Words for Melancholy

It might as well be winter. Or hard on the heels of winter, anyway. Just got in from a wild drenching hike to Trial Point, not unlike the one back on that day last November- the Walk to the Whale. I am lucky it is not colder than it is, or I would have had to have come back sooner: if not sooner, sicker. Hypothermia and I have a long standing flirtation.

Tonight however, I come home to an empty evening. Well, not entirely empty. There are the three cats. There's the chore of checking the drip buckets in the library, and emptying them, and seeing how much of the ceiling is coming down. I need to feed myself, and get warm. 8:19 in the evening and it feels like 11 o'clock. It's the dark you see, the long looked for dark, that is closing in. Which was why it was good to finally get outside again- walking. Have spent a lot of time on a boat of late, sterning; yet as much as I truly love being on the water, it doesn't exorcise my soul the same way as thousands of ravenous strides through the tangle of woods and across the strand.

Trial Point was a clusterfuck of traps from Hurricane Bill. Found one of Dave's buoys still attached to a trap, got it untangled from the rocks and another man's warp, then dragged it inland, out of reach of Tropical Depression Danny. Found the other trap in the pair well away from its mate: after parting it, the storm surge had thrown it well beyond the tree line, into the grass. Both traps were miserably mangled- but not the worst I'd seen along the way.

Walking, I'd plenty of time to chew over life of late. Am in a period of intense transition, from job to job; from Fellow to plain ol' resident; from friend to love, of sorts. I have become a person of interest now that Dave parks his truck in my driveway- and living in town, there is no escaping the eyes outside the fishbowl. The companionship has been nice (I prefer emotional understatement, you know), though the strings attached are substantial. When settled warm in his arms, there's the comforting knowledge that he is fully glad to have me there. He has other things to attend to, and the timer is always going, but he is not itching to be gone. Unfortunately, gone is what he will often be. So it goes...

It occurred to me in conversation with him today, how lax my vocabulary is in terms of mechanical jargon. Bumper, fender? There's a difference, I am sure- since Dave shook his head at me- though off the top of my head, I don't know what it is. I'm slowly picking up on more lobstering lingo, though it's like a foreign language, and I can only yet make out a few words, here and there. But as I walk, I compose, and on this page I am as confident as these men are on the water. The mechanics of the automobile, the boat, the winch? No. My verbiage is vague on those accounts. The feeling of a storm, the kind that can wear you out at your core, make you want to cry with the clouds? I can occasionally get a hook into that.