Wind Louder Than the Creek

January 2, 2010.  Saturday.

Situation:  No work tonight, so take Mway for a walk around 3:15, after hearing the news that Jungle Boy’s car was broken into down in Philly, and several very valuable items, including his laptop, were stolen.  Mway looks up from under the kitchen table as I pull down my snow suit that’s draped over the corner of the laundry room door, stretches, and lets out a squeaky yawn.  I’m hit by a blast of cold air as soon as I open the back door.

State of the Path:   The foot and paw prints are frozen up with ice, and you can hear them crunching when you step.  Beneath the powder on top, the snow is frozen underneath, which gives way underfoot.  There is a blue sky in all directions.  The seep in the path in bug land is still not frozen over.

State of the Creek:  Where the ice has receded the other day, new sheets of ice have formed.  The ice is thin, you can see the brown water beneath, and I can poke through the sheets with one jab of my walking stick.   Ice has crystallized around many of the rocks again.  The only place I can hear the gurgling of the water over the rocks is at the little cascade in the midpoint of the path along the creek.   The wind today is much louder than the creek.  The spots of water pooled up in the high grass of bug land are frozen.

The Fetch:   Throw the stick again in the strategic directions of a few days ago, toward the cement pile, the garden, and the exit to the clearing.  Even so I have not been beating down a whole bunch of the goldenrod the last couple days, though I expect by the end of the winter I might have the weeds in this whole area beaten down, except for one or two wild olive and multiflora shrubs, and might even have made some inroads into the briars growing along the garden.  I don’t notice how many times Mway fetches the stick.  One time I throw it toward the garden and she runs toward the cement pile, and I have to call her back and point in the direction where the stick is.  She corrects her direction without stopping and without wandering off the mark.  When she drops the stick, she barks, then spins around counterclockwise, as I’m stooping over to pick up the stick.  This is typically what she does; but it seems to me that she wasn’t barking a whole lot the last few days, or maybe I am so used to it I just didn’t notice it.    Her stick, the fine one that we had yesterday, is starting to get teeth marks in it and its bark is starting to wear off.