The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names. (E. O. Wilson, as cited by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal, Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson)

Friday, May 20, 2011

Poke the Stick into the Hole

May 20, 2010.  Thursday.
Situation:   Work tonight, don’t get around to taking Mway out until about 2:30.  My walking socks are still damp from two days ago; they stink, and really need to be washed.
State of the Path:  It would have been a good day to wash those socks and hang them on the line: warm and sunny.  But I am in a hurry; don’t take any side paths.  I realize today that the white flowers I thought were coming out on the multiflora are actually coming out on the blackberry runners – big white flowers.  See that I will have to bring along clippers again sometime soon; the honeysuckles are still the main obstruction to the path these days.  Poke the “pro-quality” stick into the snake hole; it doesn’t go in very far.  Mway stops at the edge of the creek – what does she see, other than a few birds (unidentifiable) fly by?  Coming up from the swale to bug land, I realize that the tree growing up right ahead of me is an oak – looking like the other young oaks around, a lone oak in this area of red willows and maple saplings.
State of the Creek:  Water hardly moving at all today, trickling among the rocks, which are white and dry in the sun.
The Fetch:  Already mentioned “pro-quality” stick.  Mway treats it like any other.  She’s full of energy, running after the big stick and bringing it back the full length of the clearing, more times than I care to count.  Three big black birds (hawks?) fly out of a walnut tree by the summer house.

2 comments:

sisyphus gregor said...

But to recognize the article and noun combination in the first place, don’t you have to recognize the linear order of words?

Anonymous said...

But I wasn’t always just reading up and down. I was looking for words I already knew and I was constantly finding those articles close beside them, and this alone directs you into reading in a linear fashion. Besides, these weren’t the only word combinations I was finding. M.