April 26, 2010. Monday.
Situation: I have to work both this afternoon and tonight. And Moi has already gone off to work this morning, and, as she yelled to me when I was still in bed, didn’t have a chance to take Mway out. So I prepare to take her out about 9:30. It’s cold and rainy, so I wear my denim jacket. When I look for my father’s safari helmet, I can’t find it, so I wear my orange wool cap instead.
State of the Path: A couple lilac branches are hanging low over the sidewalk. Since I don’t want to get too wet, I just stick to the main path, down to the creek and back. It’s only drizzling, but at several places I have to brush against bushes, and my jacket and pants get quite damp. The path in bug land is again puddled and soggy; at the seep I leave a rather deep footprint in the mud. None of the flowers have opened up. I hear peepers when I reach the sumacs, but when I arrive there, no sound seems to be coming from the pond between the ridges. For the first time in a week or so, I feel my feet growing damp inside my boots.
State of the Creek: The water in the creek is again high enough to be flowing strongly. At the log jam, there is a bush that crowds the path, and it is very narrow walking between it and the pool behind the log jam. With no sun out today, I can’t see to the bottom of the pool. I take a good look at the bush that crowds the path, as the specimen here seems to be of the species most prevalent on our land. Moi has told me that these bushes all over the place, some of them are Russian olives and others are honeysuckles, but when I look through the Audubon books just now, the photos for theses plants don’t look like what I see outside. I’m going to have to get together with Moi and see if we can identify these shrubs with more certainty.
The Fetch: Mway greets me at the clearing, and I make a first toss of the stick as I’m walking across the grass toward the one end of the clearing. The stick sinks deep into some early shoots of goldenrod, and Mway has to circle around a number of times before she finds it, snaps it up, and brings it back to me for another toss. I’ve brought one of Mway’s smaller sticks, one that she had left on the kitchen floor, and it’s evidently a stick she likes, as she fetches it a good number of times, enough times that I don’t bother counting how many. The small stick is a good one for her to chomp on and huff at as she holds it in her mouth, and typically after a number of fetches she waits for me to say “drop it” before she lets go of the stick at my feet, then spins around and winds herself up to dash off after the next toss.
2 comments:
You write that a dog first perceives words as shapes of an odor, but that with some “oracular exertion” it can also see these shapes to some degree. Can you explain what you mean by “oracular exertion”?
I’m glad you asked that, because that touches on something I didn’t have a chance to elaborate on in my paper. A dog reads mainly by smell – it smells each word as a particular distribution of an odor coming off the page. We almost need to coin a term for that odor shape: maybe “smord” would do, or the Old High German word for “word,” wort, suggestive as that is of a fragrant plant. But if a dog really opens its eyes wide – what you would call “making bug eyes” – it can, although it’s very taxing, make out the visual shape of a word also, at least if the type is 8 points or more. That’s very useful in situations where an odor can’t be detected, such as here on a computer. M.
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