January 26, 2010. Tuesday.
Situation: I have no work outside the house today. Moi works tonight. Around 3:30, I take Mway for her walk. Because earlier today Moi used some shoe repair cement on my boots, and that has to dry overnight, I have to wear an old pair of shoes and rubbers for my walk. I am back to wearing my orange wool cap.
State of the Path: It is colder and windy today. There are no streams of water in the path, but it is still soggy, very muddy in places, with plenty of puddles of water along the way. Because I’m only wearing rubbers, psychologically I feel my feet are more vulnerable to getting wet, so I walk into the weeds even more than I did yesterday, at one point even beating down a bunch of briars with my walking stick. Water is still streaming down through the maples, and by the wigwam just before bug land, I hear a sucking noise. When I look carefully, I see that water is trickling down a little hole in the ground. Although it’s hard to tell because of the weeds, the water is probably flowing underground for a few feet, where it then spouts into bug land.
State of the Creek: The water is down a little. I can hear it rushing loudly over rocks, but it is not roaring as loudly as yesterday when it was more in a state of turbulence. The logs, debris, and the plastic barrel at one of the bends are acting like a dam, and the water is pooling deeply in front, along with cow piss foam. The path is very muddy along the creek, and I see puddles of water in bugland and of course the little pond of water between the ridge around bug land and the ridge around the skating pond. At the drainage area to bug land, I see that a kind of sand bar has formed at the end along the creek, so that the water streaming out of bug land has to take a detour to the left as it trickles into the creek.
The Fetch: There are also a lot of puddles just on the other side of the ridge around bug land, where I have to step on the ant hill, but up at the clearing the ground is fairly dry. I start throwing the stick, and to my surprise I start to lose count how many times I’m throwing it. As Mway fetches the stick more and more, I throw it more and more into the weeds. Finally I throw it and the stick lands in a shrub that’s entangled in multiflora briars. Mway hops up to try to grab it from the branches, but squeals from the prick of the briars. After that, I throw the stick a few more times, but keep it well away from any weeds. When we get home, my feet are completely dry, for the first time this year.
2 comments:
Do you think Joyce never revised? You think every word of Ulysses just purled effortlessly from his throat? Revision – it’s simply part of writing. (And I think Jonson’s famous assessment of Shakespeare, that he never “blotted a line,” is sheer exaggeration – I’m sure his pages before they went to press were full of cross-outs and margin scribbles.) Revision – you have books on rhetoric and writing on your shelves – take a look in one of them sometime. I just don’t yet feel the cold water between the pads of my paws, the spattered mud pinching the fur of my belly, or taste the bark as it crumbles from the stick and clings to my tongue. M.
Don’t tell me about revision – I, who have spent hours and smoked a pack of cigarettes looking at one word on a page, then another hour or two and another pack of cigarettes on the word following, days or weeks and cartons of cigarettes on a single sentence, an entire month and a wheezing lung on a paragraph, a year and a greatly shortened life span on one page – still to be staring and twisting my hair into a second, a third, a fourth, year.
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