Transcript #1 from The Maytrees

I should like to transcribe literature on an old manual handed down from a friend, where one must remember to snap the key down quick and crisp.  I would start with poetry.  I find memorizing short little phrases for the printed page, sometimes written, sometimes scrolled out here on the laptop, somewhat meditative, especially in the winter.  This exercise is all the more important when one begins to long for lost remembrances.  May it help us remember our dreams, for who speaks to us there?  The same who gives us a language to interpret in snatches of visions and vignettes, each perhaps only a few seconds long, as we collapse repeatedly while reading, having spent our energy elsewhere.  This happened last night, so early, and yet it seemed so, so late.  I sometimes do this while reading to the children, and they wait in giddy anticipation for the day's strange tide to begin spilling out as words used to replace the printed words in front of me.  I am beguiled of the real, printed world by such reading, and often ask questions to see if they're actually paying attention.  These inadvertant soliloquies are at times helped along by too much drink, but more often than not, just the day's sojourn itself, especially if a bikeride was involved.  I am tired, but I must also read, for it informs my innerworld so.  As of late, I have fallen in love with the simple words of The Bible, of Frederic Bastiat's The Law, with anything at all written by Annie Dillard.

  
  An excerpt from Dillard's The Maytrees...

     Moving houses was Maytree's paid work.  Since he returned from out West and the war, Maytree hauled whole houses for hire, on afternoons only.  He got paid for hi-jinks.  He worked some afternoons with his old college friend Sooner Roy.  They started as carpenters, turning porches into rooms, adding apartments, and raising roofs.  Then for friends they moved the Protos' house on a Monument Hill traverse.  They detached the pump, braced corners and doorways with two-by-sixes, jacked the mildewed house, and with advisors pushed it onto a haywagon hitched to a mule team.  The mules were having none of it.  Maytree forbade whacking the mules with planks.

     Old Flo Pronto, inside, chopped onions and carrots.  People could hear her knife hit, or was it a hatchet.  Maytree guarded the mules while Sooner rounded up two tractors and Flo Pronto cranked up her woodstove.  The tractors, themselves whacked, worked.  Splay-legged in her wobbling kitchen, Flo Pronto cooked on the woodstove a slumgullion to feed the crew.  The chimney smoked, and its smoke marked their route.  Schoolchildren broke out to trail the house.

     The more houses they moved, the more house-moving jobs offered.  People dragged anchor to a patch of trees, or a hollow cheap to heat, or a patch of waterfront exposed but eminently rent-outable.  The process stimulated Maytree, and Lou, too - and children, and retired sailors, and off-duty coast guards, and neighbors - by its many routes to disaster.