Man, has it been hot! Even up here on the mountain where it's usually cool as a Sadie Hawkins kiss we been boiling. You have to understand, we don't get this kind of humidity up here but once every ten years or so and we ain't used to it. Everybody's walking around soaked and snappy, and all anybody can talk about is, "When'll it break? When'll it break?" Even the nights have been so heavy you couldn't hardly take a breath. No wind, not even a breeze, and just as hot under the trees as out in the sun, at least that's how it felt. No wonder Texans and Floridans are crazy--they have to put up with this shit all the time! It just fries your brain, and it turns your muscles all limp like spaghetti. I ain't been able to sleep at all til last night when it finally got cool after the sun went down and a breeze come down from Canada--the only time I can remember being happy about Canadian wind, which usually it comes dead in the middle of winter and as if it ain't cold enough, freezes icicles on top of the icicles you already got and bites right through your winter coat like Callie's doberman that time I didn't know he was out. Amos always used to complain that you never got a cold Canada wind when you wanted one, in a heat spell when it would do you some damn good, but we got one now, and Thank You, Montreal!

I tried to write once or twice but it was like an oven in the cabin, and I had both fans on me but it didn't help that much, I was still sweating like a stuck pig, which, what does that mean, anyway? Ma always used to say it and when I asked her what it meant, she'd say, "I hope you never have to find out," which was no help. I never seen a pig sweat, stuck or otherwise, and for that matter what does "sticking a pig" mean? Like, stick it with a knife? What would anybody want to do that for? Just piss the pig off is all it would do, and they can be mean little bastards. I ought to ask Pete, he knows a lot of stuff like that.  Anyway, I didn't write nothing because I couldn't think about nothing except how hot I was, and I was so tired from not being able to sleep that my eyes was all gunked up, what sweat does to them, I guess.

I went over to Pete's again this weekend, we're almost done over there, but to tell you the truth, neither one of us felt like doing anything at 98-goddam-wet-degrees-in-the-shade or whatever the hell it was, that he cracked a couple brews from his fridge and we just sat out on his deck (he's got a deck, which is solid as a rock because he didn't build it) under the tree in his adirondacks and watched the hawks circling over Mt. Katahdin and talked about anything that come to mind. He's one smart cookie, Professor Pete, got degrees up the ass and can tell you how King Ludwig of Bivarea banished his mistress for picking briars out of the riding master's britches if you're just dying to know about it. He's got books everywhere in his place, and he seems like he's actually read the damn things. All of them. Which would take me the rest of my life and I still wouldn't finish them. I noticed that Faulkner book I was telling you about, As I Lay Dying is the name of it, and when he found out I liked it, he loaned me a couple more he said he thought I'd like. One's by some woman with a weird name, like a man's, that he says is about a girl and a deaf-mute, and I said, "It ain't dirty, is it?" but he took to coughing right then and didn't answer me. The other one is another Faulkner, and it's called Light in August, but I think I may save that one for sometime in November because light in August is what we got way too much of at the moment, and I don't really need no more.

Pete's a good egg even if he is the worst damn carpenter I ever seen. He's real laid back and easy-going and really, for a teacher he don't talk all that much unless you ask him to. He thinks a lot and it makes him a little funny, you know? It's like he's always looking over your head at the mountain and then past the mountain at something you can't see. Every once in a while out of a clear blue sky he'll suddenly start talking about genetically-altered food or the Civil War or how Shakespear made up half the words he used in his plays, which I never knew he did that. Talking to Pete is like watching a variety show on tv--you never know where it's going to go next but chances are it won't have nothing at all to do with whatever was just on.

But what surprised the hell out of me was when he mentioned his girlfriend. I never had the slightest idea he had one, and I thought everybody knew everything about everybody else around here. She lives down in Portland, a good piece away from here, hour, hour and a half anyway, and he only sees her every couple weeks. I said, "That ain't much," and he said, "It's enough." I said, "Don't you want to live with her?", which was prying something awful, I know, only everything about the way he said it, he sounded sad. He just shook his head and then later, right in the middle of telling me about the French Revolution and how the nobles maybe deserved what they got since they'd been stealing the people blind for generations, he said, "She has a hard time with me. I write a lot and she complains I don't spend any time with her. It's better this way. When I'm with her, I'm really with her." So I asked him what he writes, and he said, "Stories," but when I asked if I could read a couple he said no, not just yet, maybe later on, so I told him I was a writer, too, at least I was taking this class, and he looked at me all shocked. "You?" he says, like somebody just told him they saw a flying porcupine doing wheelies over the barn. "Yeah," I said, "what's wrong with that?" "Nothing," he says, and he looks at me all different. "Good for you," he says. "What are you writing?" So I told him, and he's going to read some of it. He's got one of them little laptops smaller than a briefcase, and he said he was going to fire it up and read it later.

Maybe he's reading it now, you think? I hope he don't mind me talking about him. Nobody's got mad yet--nobody that knows about it, anyway--but there's a first time for everything.