It Doesn't Matter It's New Year's Day

January 1, 2010.  Friday.

Situation:  Feel like I need some fresh air early today, so I decide to surprise Mway with a walk at noon.    Somehow, though, perhaps because she hears me tell Moi, “I’m going to take Mwayla for a walk now,” she knows what’s up, and she is already skulking under the kitchen table, ready to pace in a circle as I’m suiting up.  Last night I left my gloves and orange wool cap in my car, when Pete and Katie gave me a lift back home.  So I have to find another wool cap in the mess of mismatched gloves and never-used scarves at the bottom of the bureau, and I spot Moi’s garden gloves on the hutch.  The cap I find is a lemon-yellow one, which I remember fondly from a few winters back.

State of the Path:  The sun reflecting off the snow causes me to squint as I walk on the partly brushed-off sidewalk toward the chicken coop, then follow Mway between the coop and the big outbuilding where I store the lawnmower in summer and our pool ladder in winter.  I wish I had sunglasses but my sunglasses are in my car; besides, I don’t have my contacts in so I couldn’t wear them anyway.  The snow on the ground is still pretty much a powder, there are more footsteps and paw prints in it than yesterday.  On the limbs of the trees, the snow is mostly gone, except in especially shady areas.  Down by the creek, the sky is cloudy, and I am no longer squinting or wishing I had sunglasses.

State of the Creek:  The ice is receding more in the creek.  I can poke my walking stick through one area.  I take the side path along the skating pond, stepping gingerly over the feed channel, and testing the ice in it.  It is solid.   Up at the clearing, I am squinting again, so I take my stand at the exit to the clearing, facing away from the sun, to throw the stick toward the electric pole.  I don’t count how many times Mway fetches the stick, but it doesn’t seem like enough.  When she seems ready to stop, I point a finger fiercely at the ground.  She growls, then resignedly drops the stick at my feet.  I pick it up, throw it, and she fetches it one additional time.  Back behind the house, I notice, for the first time today, a fiercely blue southern sky.

Addendum:  Since I have the time today, I think I might as well describe the path in more detail.  It’s hard to say exactly where it begins.  There’s a passageway first that goes from the outbuilding to the walled garden.  This passageway is narrow, flanked on the sides by giant multiflora bushes and other shrubs, by the trees holding up the outbuilding, by a wild grape vine that hangs overhead and drapes up the trees, by a cedar, Moi’s neglected garden pond, two plum trees and the weeds and briars around them.   The passageway leads into what Moi calls the walled garden, the area surrounded by the crumbling barn foundation where we burn our trash.  The path, I guess, begins here, leading off to the right or to the north, and first heading into high grass and occasional briars (bent down and brown at this time of year) and passing by the dilapidated pig pen.  The main path then slopes down through the field all the way to the creek, which is really a run rather than a creek.  Just beyond the pig pen, the path branches.  One branch leads through a thick area of briars into a small clearing where the stick is usually thrown.  This clearing is just a stone’s throw away from our garden., and is a fairly level area with a nice view of the northern half of the valley in which we live and the hillsides beyond.  The other branch passes through a stand of sumac trees.  This is the branch usually first taken when making the circuit down to the creek and back.  Just before the sumac trees is a side path that leads along the edge of the old orchard (consisting mostly of ash and black walnut trees, the last apple tree there being almost already dead when we moved in many years ago).  The side path goes all the way to our property line, then circles around a large cedar through weeds and briars, and returns to the main path just below the sumac trees.  This side path is not always open all the way in summer time.  The main path beyond the sumac trees goes first through an area of mostly high grass, then an area of briars, then into an area of new maples and passes by Moi’s falling-down wigwam and her new, uncompleted wigwam.  Beyond the wigwams and maples, the path enters bug land.  This is a lowland, just before the creek, further lowered by my father’s bulldozing when he owned the land, and surrounded on the upper side by a ridge of topsoil overgrown with weeds, sumacs, and maples.  Bug land was named by Jungle Boy when he was about four or five.  Filled with high grass, it is a basin for water runoff, and the area is soggy most of the year.  The path skirts one side of bug land, veering closer to the hedgerow along our back property line, then passes underneath a couple young pin oak trees and meets the creek.  At the creek, the path makes a right turn and passes through a line of ash and oak trees, most of them surrounded by wild olive and multiflora shrubs, between the creek and the high grass of bug land.  The path is rather winding, and at places you have to duck under tree branches, fallen trees, and shrubs.   The creek is fairly winding too, with eroded banks, fallen logs and branches across it, low cascades with rocks and ripples, and wider deeper pools.  At one area, the path narrows to about a foot wide between the creek bank and a long thicket of shrubs and rotting trees.  After you pass through this narrow area, you find a plank of wood set on top of the grasses of the narrow drainage outlet to bug land. The path then passes through an area with a lot of red willow shrubs and maple saplings.   Here there is another side path that goes into an area between the failed skating pond and the creek, crossing one of the feed channels of the pond and passing by the end of a ridge of topsoil, then doubling back at another ridge of topsoil, both ridges made of soil bulldozed out by my father to make the pond.  But the main path turns back into bug land and skirts the ridge of topsoil that surrounds it.  Between the ridge of bug land and the one around the skating pond (failed because it is never completely filled with water), there is an area, smaller than the skating pond, always filled with water.  At a couple of wild evergreens, the path cuts through the ridge and comes out onto the main field in an area with a lot of grass and briars and one or two new maples.  (There used to be two other side paths here, one that cut sideways through the middle of the field and led up to the main path coming down from the pig pen, with a branch following along the upperside of the ridge of topsoil leading to Moi’s wigwam, and another heading back down to the skating pond, but both side paths have become impassable with weeds and brambles the last couple years.) After passing through the drainage area, the main path lets out onto a wild strawberry patch, with a few cedars in it.   The strawberry patch may be starting to be overtaken by other weeds from the field around it.  The path makes a branch here too.  One less-used branch goes to the eastern side of an electric pole, past the pile of tree trunks that Paul Paulsen never got around to sculpting, then into the lane that goes behind the old dilapidated summer house.  The other branch goes to the other side of the electric pole into the clearing.