Sumac Berries on the Snow

February 8, 2010.  Monday.

Situation:   Work in the early afternoon.  When I get home, Moi and Mway are napping, so I lie down to read a little.  After about an hour, around 4:30, I hear them get up, so I get up myself, and start to put on my walking clothes.  But I can’t find my white walking socks, so I go downstairs barefoot to see if I put them in front of the wood pellet stove the other day to warm them up, but I can’t find them downstairs either.  I ask Moi if she’s seen them, but she says no and gets me a pair of thick gray socks that, at any rate, will be better than the socks I’ve been wearing.  She then asks me, considering that I might have put my other socks in front of the fire to dry them off, how my boots have been working.   I tell her that there’s been a great improvement, but that my socks still seem to get damp somewhat after a walk.  She says that could be a problem with rubber boots, that my feet may perspire in them.  That may be true, I think, but I also suspect that there might be other hairline cracks in the boots that we’ve overlooked.

State of the Path:  Mway shoots out the door and immediately starts eating snow.  Moi has cleared most of the sidewalk off.   Down by the outbuilding, Mway starts sniffing at prints in the snow, and hangs behind for a while, while I walk past the snow covered trash in the walled garden toward the pig pen.  The path is smashed down by foot and paw prints, and it’s not too difficult walking.   On the side path by the orchard, there are one set of distantly spaced paw prints, probably rabbit prints, but I don’t go that way because the snow is not smashed down on the path.  I find similar prints down on the side path by the skating pond, and I don’t go that way either.  Along the creek, at the midcenter oaks, I tear off a muliflora briar that’s hanging down in the path.  On the other side of the ridge coming back up from bug land, the snow is speckled with red bits of dried sumac flower (I guess they would be the dried berries).

State of the Creek:  Snow still covers the logs at the log and barrel jam, and only around a few shrubs does it seem that the sun has melted the snow, so you can see the ground and brown leaves beneath.  The ice has grown thicker; air bubbles sliding along the thin ice around the rocks; caps of snow on the rocks.  A quiet gurgle here and there.

The Fetch:  I throw the stick once toward the exit of the clearing, and Mway eagerly dashes after it, but she drops it before bringing it all the way back, snorting and coughing, as I see, on the snow that’s gotten in her mouth and nostrils from retrieving the stick.  But then I start throwing the stick back down the path toward the strawberry patch, and Mway has a better time of it, because the stick isn’t sinking into the snow as much.   More than 3 fetches today, but still under 10.  Back in the house, I check my socks.  The one only seems a little damp, but the toe on the other seems soggier than it should be.