Just got back from Italy. The differences between Florence, Ontario (pop. 200), and Florence, Italy (pop. 500,000), are staggering. The stage backdrop curtain at the former's community centre painted by Miss Emma Kerby really does pale next to, for instance, the Birth of Venus. The similarity is this: there are the same number of parking spaces in the two Florences.

Ooo, posting is easier now. But that's not what I'm here to say. I'm here to tell you about hearing things wrong. I would be an expert on this topic if I were actually AWARE of all the times I've heard things wrong, so I won't claim that but just tell you about this morning at 5. We were loading chickens, five to a crate. Three (chickens) were left over - sounds like a math question. We solved Problem A by allowing ("Yeah, 'allowing'," say the chickens) six chickens in three of the crates. I moved to open one with my left hand, squawking indignant hurricane of feet and feathers in my right, when Anna said, "Be careful; that one's full of spiders."
Spiders? In the crate? How big could they possibly be? Wouldn't one or two of the five chickens have eaten them already? Not hungry at 5 a.m.? But still.
"Spiders?" I asked. "No, fighters," Anna enunciated patiently and clearly. "That one's full of fighters."
It was full of baleful glarers once the sixth was added.

It's been a long time. It's spring now. The storms are electrical, not icy. I've spent too much time looking at what other people have written and have jotted little of my own. A book title came to mind last night: Trying to Forget the Merchant of Venice.

We're all set. We have the ingredients. If this ice storm develops as they say it will and the power goes out and the roads slick over, we'll be eating stew cooked atop the cellar wood stove. And some sort of pan bread, maybe dumplings. So don't worry about us.

When someone writes he is working from a laptop, do you picture exactly that? Him perched near the edge of a kitchen chair (chrome with the cracked black rubber booties at the leg ends and that cross-hatched grimy blue-with-the-flowers vinyl seat and back cover with just the one slice top left with its fluffy whiteish edges revealing tan/orange foam), black laptop made a bit shabby by the scene and balanced precariously on just that, the top of his lap? He's hunched a bit?
Do you?