Make Plans to Bring in the Clippers

May 4, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  Early this morning I drive over to pick up my lawnmower, and while Stroup fixed the drive belt, he demonstrates to me how the engine is sputtering – which only increases my anxiety about mowing a lawn whose grass is already too high for the small-sized lawnmower I have.  To make matters worse, while I’m working this afternoon, a rain storm passes over the valley, which surely will make the grass all the more hard to mow.  When I get home about 4, instead of getting to work on the lawn, I take Mway for a walk first, hoping that the sun will dry up the grass at least a little bit.

State of the Path:  As I walk along today, my main purpose is to shuffle along slowly in my boots so as to tramp down as much of the new weeds in the path as possible – the sweet grass, the goldenrod, the blackberry shoots, the wild mustard, the hedge garlic, some milkweed near the jack-in-the-pulpits (whose leaves are now a half a foot wide), other grasses, and numerous other weeds which I’m unable to identify.  The path is puddled down in bug land, so I have to side step the path there and walk in the grass, where there’s still a bed of brown dead grass beneath the new grass coming up.  Numerous times during the walk I have to wade through the overgrown honeysuckle bushes, and I hold hopes someday soon to bring a hedge clipper along with me on my walk so I can trim them back.  I note as I walk along the creek that a couple of the smaller trees are oaks, but again I look at the highest ones, the ones engulfed by the honeysuckle, and they appear again to me to be some sort of ash.  I don’t notice any new flowers that have come up.  Again I don’t take the side path along the skating pond, because of the big honeysuckle bush blocking the path.  I stand there looking at the bush for a while, taking in the fragrance.

State of the Creek:  The water is a little higher than yesterday, and water is again trickling through the swale from bug land, and flowing around the sandbar on which jewelweed is growing. A couple frogs jump in the water as I walk along.  Mway stops at the log jam to sniff for a moment, as if something might be lurking in the debris that fills the branches of the jam.

The Fetch:  I bring along my “pro-quality” stick today, simply because I want to have a little pleasure in my life today.  Mway, who’s been sitting home alone all day, fetches it more than I might have expected, up to around eight times, although I do notice that as the number of fetches increase the big stick sags more and more from her mouth to one side as she carries it back to me.