December 28, 2009. Monday.
Situation: No work today so I take Mway out around 4 pm. She goes through part of her routine to coax me out the door: slamming her body against the bedroom door while I’m reading, eyeing me imploringly when I’m down in the kitchen, circling the kitchen table and whining as I put on my rubber boots and snow suit.
State of the Path: Pretty much the same as the last time, but the ground feels more waxy and crunchy underfoot. The air is especially cold and humid – even with my snowsuit, I realize right away that I don’t feel like walking. The jaggers and briars that stick out into the path do irritate me today – especially one multiflora bush somewhere along the path that I never noticed before, which catches my arms with its overreaching thorn stems – I think to myself that this is one I’ll have to trim back sometime this winter. Eventually I come across some flecks of snow on the path, just a dribble from some very few flurries that must have fallen today. Along the creek, a small tree has fallen across the path. Its little trunk is still rooted in the ground, so I just leave it where it is for now.
State of the Creek: The water is a little lower today; in places its color is turning rusty brown, but it is still not iced up. There is what appears to be solid ice in the first feed channel to the skating pond. I don’t step on it, though, for fear of putting my foot through it like I did the other day. I venture to hop over the channel, but the foot holds are shallow, and the ground too cold to make them deeper by pressing into them. I realize that this channel is becoming harder and harder for me to hop across, and I’d like to do something about it. The second feed channel (which I don’t have to cross) has running water flowing out of it.
The Fetch: Up in the clearing, I expect Mway to be very eager to fetch, especially since this is our first walk since Atlas went home. I throw the stick farther out into the dead stands of goldenrod around the garden, trying to utilize Mway’s body force to knock them down. Mway is enthusiastic, spinning around at my feet and running at top speed toward the stick, but not especially so. I notice some pretty fungus on an abandoned stick. We fetch, maybe 6 or 7 times, and that’s it; she’s ready to quit rather quickly, keeping the stick in her mouth after she fetches it to tell me so. I’m ready to quit too, and as usual she runs ahead of me as we head back toward the house. Maybe she is as cold as I am. By the time I reach the back door my hands and feet are turning numb.
4 comments:
Now with brother Atlas back at the place where he belongs, I thought you’d be able to better dig into physical reality. But you’re still “telling” more than you’re “showing.” Take your statement: “Mway is enthusiastic, spinning around at my feet and running at top speed toward the stick, but not especially so.” That’s your conclusion, huh? Then show me the evidence, so I can draw the conclusion myself. “Mway spins at my feet but once, tongue flopping tired over wind burnt gums.” In rhetoric, this is called enthymeme, a truncated syllogism. You enunciate one premise. The reader presumes the second premise, then feels she’s there in the field herself. M.
Listen, you’re not telling me anything I don’t know already. All I can do, since I’m not going to rewrite this whole damn journal, is point you again to the excuses I make in my intro. Just be glad, M., that, after all the work I did this past year, I’m still taking you for a walk pretty much everyday. Except Sundays, yes, let me be clear about that – except Sundays, and, yes, maybe on a day I might actually go somewhere sometime.
I'm only trying to help out. M.
I know you are.
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