May 8, 2010. Saturday.
Situation: Moi tells me that Ezra has told her that the strange tree down by the creek is a hickory. I’m willing to believe him, but this surprises me somewhat because I think of a hickory as a big tree. Of course the tree down by the creek must be a young tree, and as Moi has pointed out there are a couple other young trees down there like it too. In the Audubon, the hickory that most resembles what I see is the shagbark hickory, although on our young specimens the bark is not so shaggy. But the leaves, “pinnately compound…5 elliptical or ovate,” match what I see, as well as the twigs, “ending in large brown hairy buds.” This morning Moi is upset because she can’t find Squeak, the cat that we just got this past year. Squeak never goes outside because she is afraid to, but Moi can’t find her anywhere in the house and fears that Squeak ventured outside and is now hiding under a bush somewhere, scared because it is raining. Moi wakes me up with this news, and after I help her open up doors to look for Squeak, I go back to bed. Moi later wakes me up to tell me she finally found Squeak: she was trapped in one of Moi’s closets. Moi is working all day today, and we both work together tonight. I take Mway out about 4:30.
State of the Path: I bring the Audubon tree book, but I don’t crack it open the whole walk. In the old orchard, I notice there’s a new plant that’s taken over covering the ground. It looks to me like Virginia creeper, but it looks odd to me because the leaves are so big. Some of the hedge garlic is now about as high as my chin. The wild cherry along the side path now has clusters of white flowers. I see buds on the raspberries and the blackberries. I take a look at the hickory, and just have to shake my head at thinking this young tree, with leaves that look so gangly, is a hickory. I go over the feed channel, surprised at how easy I find the footholds and get across, and at the ridge at the opposite end of the skating pond, I see, as I’ve been expecting any day now because I’ve seen it in past years, some newly blooming phlox. In bug land, the Russian olives look almost snow covered with their white flowers.
State of the Creek: Despite the rain, the creek is not that high. At the log jam, I notice a branch of the honeysuckle I had cut lying in the water, but as I’m walking along the creek, I also notice on the water a lot of maple and oak leaves that have been blown down by the wind today, and also honeysuckle flowers that have been shed from the bushes. Beneath the ashes, I hear a trilling sound that I think is my friend the woodpecker. But when I look around for him I can’t find him.
The Fetch: Up at the clearing, I toss one of Mway’s smaller sticks that she had left in the kitchen after an earlier walk. On about the fifth toss, as Mway is spinning around and I draw back the stick, I suddenly hear a bonk. It seems to be that I must have hit Mway in the head, but I don’t hear her yelp or respond in any way. I throw the stick, and she fetches it but only brings it halfway back. I walk over to it and toss it again, but she doesn’t go after it, and I have to walk over to get it, worried that she has really hurt herself. But when I pick the stick up, she starts spinning around, coaxing me to throw it again, and I don’t see Mway bleeding anywhere. I toss it again a couple times in the opposite direction, until Mway decides it’s time to go back to the house. I look again at Mway, and she certainly isn’t acting like she hurt herself, but as I walk back I’m concerned.
3 comments:
It’s interesting to consider that the “A” volume of the encyclopedia has an article, “ALPHABET,” that might have helped you learn capital and lower case letters.
Only if I came upon it by chance and it made some sense to me – which for a long time it didn’t, because the article, “ALPHABET,” showed a picture of an Egyptian obelisk and the Roman Pantheon, and so I thought that ALPHABET, like the word “ARCHITECTURE,” meant something like – well, I wasn’t sure whether it meant a large stone object, a house, an outbuilding, the walled garden, or what – for a while, if you threw the stick by the cement rubble, I’d think to myself, “oh, it’s over there by the ALPHABET.” But these are all confusions that enough time and study of pictures could eventually clear up, and I think I explain that fairly well in Part !. Ask me again about verbs. Incidentally, I eventually came across some newer volumes of the World Book encyclopedia, which you’d leave occasionally sitting on your armchair, and these contained guide words printed out mainly in minuscules: “Animal” instead of “ANIMAL.” So I was able to compare those differences. Also, the encyclopedia volumes all contained entries on letters. This caused much confusion for a while – because, for example, the entry on the letter “A” included an illustration of an ox. I’d look at the entry on “ANT,” and I’d ask myself, “what does this have to do with oxen?” M.
Notice today that, more than thirteen years ago, I noticed some flowers I call phlox. Realize now I should have called them dame's rockets. Learned the right word for them a few years ago. Can take a long time, if not forever, toward that first step toward wisdom.
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