Despite Myself, Look at Some More Trees

May 9, 2010.  Sunday.

Situation:  As usual, work all day today.  When I get home it’s still light out, and, although Moi tells me Mway’s already eaten and I wouldn’t have to take her out, the dog follows me around the house so much as I take off my work clothes, I decide to take her out anyway.  It’s about 7 pm.  I put on my father’s denim jacket, it’s that cold out.

State of the Path:  Out in the back yard, I notice that leaves and seeds from the maple and branches from the birch have been blown down by the wind the past couple days.  After that, though, I stride straight down to the creek – don’t feel like looking at anything today.  I do stop, however, near the young hickory, subject of our inspection these past few days, to look at the trees surrounding it.  Moi had told me she thought there was a large hickory on the other side of the creek, which would explain the presence of a younger tree nearby, but this morning when she looked, she saw that the tree she was thinking about was a maple.  When I stop, I first look up at the big trees in the hedgerow.  Unfortunately, from where I’m standing in the path, I can’t see the leaves very well; the light is dim, and my contacts are nearing the end of their shelf-life.  I almost decide to just forget about it, but then I step into the weeds to get a little closer to the trees.  When I do, I can finally make out that the big trees in the hedgerow, or at least three of them that are right there in the vicinity, are oaks – probably the same kind of oaks as what I’ve been calling pin oaks, the smaller trees being relatively new trees that have come up in recent years near the path and that have surely been spawned by these older trees.  To tell you the truth, I’m not sure whether these are pin oaks, or black oaks, or some other kind of oak – that’s something I hope to clarify eventually.  The only other tree that I see nearby is a medium-sized tree closer to the creek, which has those nondescript leaves that are characteristic of an ash or a hickory.  Although the leaves on this tree do not look exactly like the gangly leaves on the young hickory, I tell myself that this must be the older hickory that spawned the younger specimens nearby.  Then I wonder to myself where Moi saw a maple down here.   After I look around, I see that there is indeed a large maple growing on the other side of the creek.  And now that I’m writing about this, I realize that there is another tree down there I should have looked at – the tree on which the deer stand is located.  I can’t recall right now what kind of tree this is, or if I even looked to see what kind of tree this is.  On the rest of the walk up to the clearing, I don’t really look at anything, except to notice that on the honeysuckle bush below the ashes that I’ve previously called a bella honeysuckle the pink flowers are turning yellow, just as the white flowers on the Morrow’s have been turning yellow.

State of the Creek:  I don’t look too much at the creek today, except to think to myself that it looks awfully low in places.

The Fetch:  I bring along one of Mway’s smaller sticks, and don’t bother to start counting the fetches.  But it seems to me she only fetches it about five times.  On one fetch, the stick falls into a shrub at the border of the clearing, and Mway has to stick her head into it, maw first, to extract it.  Mway shows no signs of being hit on the head yesterday with a stick.