u/tyke665

Tall, thin, slightly cadaverous, Uncle Balt's voice issued from his body as from a length of pipe. He was completely and supremely "an uncle." I saw him rarely, so he retained a foreign flavor for me, an exotic far-offness that his mustache-two droopy loops of thin black rope-did nothing to diminish. He had an immense stride, and a posture like his gaze: straight, unbending, blunt. Work had pastured his face the way weather wears a field. Past burning, beyond tanning, not even any longer leathered, it seemed the sorrowful smoothing out of some angrily wadded paper, his bones like the shadows of bones behind his skin, a gift from the butcher for the dog.

In some ways the grasshoppers were worse, for they were their own wind, and a living dust, a dust winged, each grain with a chewing mouth. God had breathed life into clay again, and was distributing it differently this time-by means of sky-over the whole earth. The dust howled and hissed, or otherwise moved with a harsh shush, but the grasshoppers had a dry whirr and rustle, a toy chirp, a click almost mechanical, a stridulation which became a scream. This was new speech; this was greed made manifest and multiplied like man, greed given a body appropriate to it, with long hind-leaping legs and feet, motive wings, tireless jaws, and no nervous tics about food. They would eat the fur from cats, some said. And so they came in wide flat covering clouds, in enormous flooding sheets—millions and millions of swallowing mouths. I never saw a cyclone clean the ground as they could clean it. Fields went up in minutes—as though in flames, in smokeless hunger. Where they settled down the land seethed. Streets rained their color (a yellow brown green), sidewalks crawled, your feet could not avoid them, so wherever you went (and you went nowhere if possible) you heard and dimly felt the crunch of soft shells.

Very mild and warm. About 6 glow-worms shining faintly.

We went up as far as the grove. When we came home the fire was out. We ate our supper in the dark, and went to bed immediately. William was disturbed in the night by the rain coming into his room, for it was a very rainy night. The ash leaves lay across the road.

There's death in every diary. I've found it there the way I've found so many words, lying silent and forgotten like old shoes stiffening in a closet, or moving at the approach of my eye like a spider in a toolbox, as though some small piece of metal were alive. Wasn't there a day in infancy when such a startle would have made my limbs splash open?

I pick up my dropped life in this calamitous century's sixty-seventh year, a year windy with unreason, noisy with nonsense and meaningless milling; a year, like the last, just right for a decade as mired in morality as a circus in mud, as infested with fakes as a fair. Perhaps it's only a trampled package in the street-this life I pick up—and maybe my writing is its furtive unwrapping.

In a diary you may go to greet death in the most slovenly state of undress and disease, your language out of reach of any public reading, your own eye kind, accustomed to your own wastes and malodorous ailments, almost incapable of offense, incurably forgiving. You may write without anyone's whining that the day was not only "mild" but "warm" as well; you can pointlessly infer that if the rain came pelting into Wm's room, it must have been a rainy night indeed; and you can inadvertently say something beautiful containing ash leaves, and never register what you saw of the storm, or felt about love in your unbrothered bed, or say that you wept along your sleeping arm, or signify how well you grasped the sense of what you said.

The path took Henry Pimber past the slag across the meadow creek where his only hornbeam hardened slowly in the southern shadow of the ridge and the trees of the separating wood began in rows as the lean road in his dream began, marowing to nothing in the blank horizon, for train rails narrow behind anybody's journey; and he named them as he passed them: elm, oak, hazel, larch and chestnut tree, as though he might have been the fallen Adam passing them and calling out their soft familiar names, as though familiar names might make some friends for him by being spoken to the unfamiliar and unfriendly world which he was told had been his paradise. In God's name, when was that? When had that been? For he had hated every day he'd lived. Ash, birch, maple. Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night clicked past as he walked by the creek by the hornbeam tree, the elders, sorrels, cedars and the fir; for as he named them, sounding their soft names in his lonely skull, the fire of fall was on them, and he named the days he'd lost. It was still sorrowful to die. Eternity, for them, had ended. And he would fall, when it came his time, like an unseen leaf, the bud that was the glory of his birth forgot before remem-bered. He named the aspen, beech, and willow, and he said aloud the locust when he saw it leafless like a battlefield. In God's name, when was that? When had that been?