It No Longer Matters That It's Sunday

March 14, 2010.  Sunday.

Situation:  Work all day today, but because of daylight savings time, when I get home it is still light out.  Although Moi says I don’t need to take Mway for a walk, since Moi hasn’t yet taken the garbage can down the lane and it looks like I’ll have to do that, I decide I might as well take Mway for a walk too.  So I get out of my work clothes (sports jacket, black knit sports shirt, black slacks, socks, and loafers), put on my walking clothes, and take Mway out about 6:30.

State of the Path:  Moi says it has been raining most of the day, so I’m curious to see how things look.  On my way to work this morning, I saw that P____ Creek was overflowing its banks.  It’s not raining now, though.  But from Moi’s garden pond down to the creek, the whole path is puddled or soggy, and I have to walk as much to the side as possible, even stamping on whole thickets of briars.  Coming up from the creek, the path is also almost entirely wet, and around bug land it is so soggy I finally feel the water seeping into my boots.  In the walled garden, I see and hear some birds perching in the trees.  In the dim light I can’t tell what they are – sparrows I figure.  Any bird that I can’t identify at this point, I call a sparrow.  In the maples down by the wigwams, there are steams of water flowing down through the field, which cross the path right at the ridge and trickle down into bug land.

State of the Creek:  The water in the creek is high and it is flowing strongly, but it is not overflowing its banks.  It’s hard to tell, but it looks like the creek might have overflowed its banks earlier today or last night.   It’s hard to tell, because there has been debris stacked up along the banks since the flooding a couple months ago, but it does look to me like the new grass that has been growing on the path has been recently swept down.  In the log jam, the cow piss foam is sudsing up so much it looks the head of a beer.  I take Mway’s fetching stick and scoop up some of the froth, take a look at it, then poke the stick back in the water to let the suds clump up with the main batch.  The water from bug land is flowing more strongly today, and I see there’s water flowing toward the creek from the pond between the ridge around bug land and the ridge around the skating pond.  I walk over to the feed channel to the skating pond, but I don’t cross it because the banks of the channel look too slippery.  The water in the channel is not flowing, but I see water extending back into the high grass of the skating pond itself.

The Fetch:  From what Moi told me earlier, I expect that Mway will not be in the mood, or see the necessity, to do too much more fetching today, but she still greets me at the clearing with an eager smile and carries out the few fetches she does do very enthusiastically.   However, it is what I expect: she only fetches the stick about four times.  When I first arrive at the clearing, I see that the stick with the fungus on it has been broken into two pieces, and I wonder if earlier today Mway might have chewed it into two.