May 3, 2010. Monday.
Situation: Moi and I both work today, and indeed she’s still working when I get home around 5. I take Mway out at 5:30.
State of the Path: There was a brief but heavy downpour while I was at work, and its effects are apparent here. The grass in the lawn is worrisomely high. Moi left a message that my mower has been repaired, but I am anxious about picking it up tomorrow and getting the opportunity to mow, without the lawn mower coughing to a halt in the thick grass and perhaps even breaking down again. The wind blows the helicopter-like seeds off the maples in front of me, both by the pool and down at the wigwams. Seemingly overnight a few blackberry shoots have shot up two feet high in some places on the path; I tramp as many down as I can – same with any goldenrod shoots. What Moi calls sweet grass is now coming up in places. Bug land is again soggy, and I feel dampness in my socks. I beat back a couple blackberry brambles down by the creek.
State of the Creek: At least four frogs jump into the water as I’m walking along the bank of the creek, one of them into the feed channel to the skating pond. In front of the channel, a bunch of wild gardenias have appeared – I’m sure they weren’t there yesterday; at least I didn’t notice them. I don’t bother to cross the channel, not only because of the slippery foot holds, but also because the honeysuckle bush is starting to clog the space on the other side.
The Fetch: I’ve brought along one of Mway’s smaller sticks. On the second toss, she dashes off in the wrong direction and I have to call her back and direct her with shouts to where the stick landed. After a couple more tosses, she again runs off in the wrong direction, and this time, after she wanders for a while looking for the stick lost in the young goldenrod, I even have to walk over to where it landed to point it out to her. I almost reach down to pick it up, but at the last moment Mway spies it and snaps it up as if she has had no help from me. On the way back to the house, in that part of the path through the briars near the sumacs, I suddenly come face to face with a spider web spread across the path. Since Mway now has the stick that I use to clear away obstacles, I have to pick up the stalk of an old weed to knock the web down.
2 comments:
But a book has a front cover and a back cover, and they cannot always be distinguished by printed matter. Through which door does the book begin?
Exactly. That can be a big problem. Fortunately the two doors of your house that lead outside both swivel open in a leftward direction, just as the front cover of a book does. This helped me out a lot, but I don’t know if this would be the situation for all canines. Basically I think a dog has to understand how language is ordered in order to understand how a book is ordered. M.
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