April 17, 2010. Saturday.
Situation: This morning I go online and google “tree with compound leaves of three.” It takes visits to several sites, to compare information, but I’m very confident that I can now say that the mystery tree is a boxelder, which is a kind of maple tree also called an ashleaf maple. The difficulty in identifying the tree comes from the fact that sometimes the tree has leaflets of five – which is why I didn’t find it in Audubon: the picture in that book shows a similar leaf, albeit with five leaflets. But online I did find a photo on one site showing 3 toothed leaflets that looks exactly like what I see in the back acre, and on another site there was a photo of the flowers that I saw in the early spring, with a description on still another site describing the flowers as “borne singly on thread-like, drooping stalks…in clusters” that come out in early spring before the leaves. And the reason I didn’t see them on the other specimens out there is that the boxelder is dioecious, meaning it has separate male and female trees. The flowers that I saw are male. Interestingly, the boxelder does not grow all over the Mid-Atlantic states, but it does appear in the Susquehanna Valley
State of the Path: It’s cold enough today to wear my wool cap and denim jacket. Speaking of poison ivy, in the last couple days I saw its red leaves poking up through a cinder block by my car in the waste area between the driveway and our nearest McNeighbor’s yard. I’ve also seen some of its red leaves in the side garden by the house. I know poison ivy well, as I’ve pulled up tons of it over the years; indeed when we first moved here I had to pull up whole bushes that had grown over outbuildings and eaten away the wood. These days now I still pull up some poison ivy every year, but mostly just whatever grows close to the house or threatens one of the yard trees or one of the outbuildings that we use. The forsythias are starting to lose their yellow flowers, replaced by green leaves – I now know that the yellow things that first appeared on the forsythias are flowers; I’ve learned that some plants get flowers first then leaves, while others get leaves then flowers. An example of the latter are the lilacs around the house: they’ve had their leaves for a while and they are now just getting their white or purple flowers. I’ve forgotten to mention that the wild mustard’s flowers, which were green before, are now starting to turn yellow – or is it that the flowers are now just starting to get yellow petals? And I’ve also forgotten to mention that the garlic hedge is coming up in more places and growing taller – there’s a lot around the old barn wall. Most of the male flowers of the boxelder in the old orchard are gone. I take a fairly close look at what I assume are the couple female trees growing nearby, and which I never really noticed until they had gotten their leaves. These trees never had the same flowers as the other one, which had them in abundance, or any flowers at all that I noticed, but one of the trees seems to have some now: they are similar to the male flowers, but the threads are not as long. Another tree that I’d like to identify is the one growing up behind the jack-in-the-pulpits. Whatever kind of tree that is, it’s the same kind as the tree I see out my office window, and which I have to bend under every time I mow the lawn. I’ll see if Moi knows what kind of tree this is. I’d still like to know what the tiny yellow, star-like flowers are -- but, as I leaf through it again, Audubon is still of no help.
State of the Creek: It rained last night, so the seep in bug land is again soggy. It’s too cold for water striders or minnows to appear in the water of the creek, let alone the spring peepers, whom I heard again last night when I was coming back from work. The flowers of the trout lilies and the cheeses, not to mention the dandelions, are staying shut today because of the cold.
The Fetch: I’d say Mway definitely prefers the new, lighter stick, as she fetches it close to ten times today. She’s already started to chew it away, though, and on my second or third toss the stick breaks in half, so I only have half the stick to throw after that. Moi just walked in, and I ask her what tree that is outside the office window. She thinks it’s a wild cherry. So let’s see – Audubon lists a wild cherry as the same as a black cherry, and has a picture of one on page 136. Perhaps this is what it is, but I can’t be sure until later in the season when flowers and berries appear. Moi and I both work tonight, so I’ll probably end up taking Mway for a second walk this afternoon, but unless something unusual happens, this is all I’ll report on today.
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Preview of Troubles with Sentences
So we now see that, by a meticulous study of reading materials, particularly illustrated pre-school children’s books deliberately designed to show the correspondence between signifiers and their signifieds, the underemployed family dog, over the course of several years, acquires a reasonably accurate comprehension of the meanings of a certain number of words. These words tend to be of a certain kind, those whose meanings can be easily illustrated in picture form: words of concrete things in the physical environment with which the canine is familiar -- “boy,” “bird,” “house,” “tree” – and perhaps of a few simple actions – “sit,” “walk,” “see.” At this point, the vast majority of canines will rest content, as these few simple words will indulge their nostalgia and calm their anxiety, and these dogs will do no more than lie on top of the book, sniff a word every now and then, then fall asleep. But there may be at least one canine who cannot rest until it understands every word that it encounters, a canine who, for example, one day pulls down from a shelf a book that falls open to a page with an illustration of a man holding a piece of paper over a dog’s head. Under the illustration is a caption, “Wolf Frolics with Me,” words that show no simple correspondence to the picture, and on the page opposite are even more words that show no apparent correspondence to anything – “After Wolf and I had frolicked a bit, I turned my attention to Legrand’s drawing. To tell the truth, I was quite puzzled at what I saw” – except that there again is the image of “Wolf,” and there also is “frolicked,” something similar to “Frolics,” and there also is “my,” something that looks and smells very much like “Me.” We must now look at how this particular canine gains a knowledge of reading material beyond a handful of simple words, and we have been prepared to do this by our analysis of the morphemics of scents. But before we do this we must look briefly at another overarching problem facing the canine: the difficulty of physical manipulation of reading materials.
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