May 21, 2010. Friday.
Situation: Work tonight, take Mway out about 2:30, after her and Moi’s nap. Today I did manage to wash my walking socks, as well as my walking work shirt, so I have at least a partially clean outfit to wear today.
State of the Path: Today I went online to do a little research on blackberries, and found one website that was fairly informative. A chief detectable difference between a blackberry and a black raspberry (which I kind of already knew) is that the former bears an aggregate fruit and the latter a single fruit that come off with a hollow pit and leaves a receptacle behind on the branch when picked; a dewberry is a type of blackberry that grows along the ground. As I walk along the old orchard, I start to think that what I’ve been calling black raspberries might just be young blackberries – when the fruit comes in I guess I’ll finally be able to tell for sure; but it seems to me that in past years we’ve had both types of berries. I don’t see any, and I don’t ever remember seeing, any dewberries. One website says that brambles are a common name for blackberries – a jagger or a briar I suppose would be any type of plant with a thorn. It seems to me that I see blackberries in three general states: there are the new green shoots that are coming up; there are the canes that are now bearing leaves and pretty white five-petaled flowers; then there are the dead canes that will bear no leaves or flowers and are very prominent along the path between the sumacs and the pig pen and outbuilding. I also look at the multiflora bushes today, which seem to me to be not as robust as they have been in past years. There’s one bush on the sidepath near the hedgerow (the one I’ve been scaring the robin out of), hemmed around by jewelweed, which seems to have another bush, with skinny leaves and bright red stems, growing over it; I see this at some other places too, and I begin to think that maybe these are new stems of multiflora coming in. Coming up from the ridge around bug land and just before the strawberry field, I see a multiflora bush which is bearing white flowers, which are white and five-petalled just like a blackberry flower: so I was right when I thought I saw flowers on a multiflora the other day.
State of the Creek: Mway wades into the creek and takes a sip of water, then wanders around the weeds on the far bank. By the time I get to the creek I realize it’s a little warm today to be wearing a long-sleeve work shirt, but this is what I wear on my walks.
The Fetch: I bring along a smaller stick today, one that I found in the music room, where Mway frequently drops her sticks after her walks with Moi in the morning. She drops them there, I suppose, to remind me of our walks in the afternoon. She fetches the stick more times than I care to count, and we play “Put it down!” once, but the smaller stick gets lost a couple times in the goldenrod and sweet grass, and Mway has to spend up to a minute looking for it; which seems to me to be a good argument for using the “pro-quality” stick on our walks.
2 comments:
What other ones were you finding?
Well, one word that intrigued me, and that I was encountering often – not so much in the encyclopedia, but in books with narratives like “The Adventures of Taxi Dog” – was the word “I.” It intrigued me in part because it stood out, being a single-letter word always in capital form, often appearing at the beginning of a group of words, and shaped like the numeral “1.” It intrigued me even more by its ubiquity, but unlike the also ubiquitous similar single-letter word “a,” I never found it in front of any of the nouns I knew. Indeed, in “The Adventures of Taxi Dog,” I was finding it in front of, or very close to, the two action words “ride” and “sang” -- “I ride,” “I could ride,” “I sang” – as well in front of other words I hadn’t yet figured out, “I sit,” “I grew,” “I roamed,” “I ate.” When I first encountered “The Adventures of Taxi Dog,” I was extremely distraught because I didn’t find the word “dog” anywhere except in the title, but here was a word now that I was finding in front of the actions that I knew the dog was performing, so, in the absence of the word “dog,” I had a very strong feeling that the word “I” somehow referred to the dog. But was “I” the dog’s name, or was “I” another word for “dog”? This didn’t seem reasonable because I was encountering the word “I” in other books at the time (various Dr. Seuss books and a couple variations of the Gingerbread Man story come to mind), and in those books, there was no dog, and in particular, no Taxi Dog. M.
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