May 13, 2010. Thursday.
Situation: I limit my work today to that which I have to do tonight (tomorrow I may have to work day and night and may not even have time for a walk; we’ll see), and take May out about 1:30 for a leisurely walk. However, when I get back, Moi, home from her work this morning, points out to me that the Boy has received a notice of an impending bench warrant because he failed to pay a fine this month, and I’ll have to take care of this before work tonight, so my report of my walk, unlike the walk itself, will not be so leisurely.
State of the Path: Mway and I both see rabbit in back yard. See squirrel going up a tree behind the walled garden. Take side path along old orchard. A lot of the blackberry brambles remain flattened from the winter; wonder if they’ll spring up in this area like they usually do. Down at the creek, figure there must be more black walnut trees down here than I realized. Hard to tell, because so many of the trees are tall and it’s hard to see their leaves. Take side path by skating pond, clutching the honeysuckle branches to keep my balance as I jump the feed channel. See more phlox – but we don’t get as much as I see these days, say, along road sides.
State of the Creek: Water a little higher. Coming toward the big maple, hear pecking sound. As I get closer, pecking stops. But after looking for sometime, spy my redbellied friend among leaves on a high branch. Flitting about the shrubs, a female cardinal, who seems to be trying to get the attention of the woodpecker.
The Fetch: With smaller stick, a well chewed one I found in the living room today, more fetches than I care to count. As she spins around between fetches, Mway’s heedless about what she might trample on, including the stick that once had fungus on it, still lying in the clearing, that gets bounced around beneath her paws.
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Today, I brushed back some may apples and discovered, in the shadows beneath their parasol-like leaftops, beautiful sunflower-like flowers, with vanilla petals and orange pistils. I never in my life saw a may apple flower before – never thought all last year to look for them. Why would a plant hide its flowers underneath its leaves?
What’s going on here today? Earlier I went to look at your blog and you hadn’t posted anything yet. Now I have to get on here while you’re downstairs eating supper – a difficult thing for me to do. And then I see you’ve apparently abandoned our interview. You’ve posted a question, but it’s hardly one directed to me. And what happened to our interview from yesterday? M.
This morning Blogger was messing around with some technical matter and I couldn’t post anything. Sorry about the question about the may apple flowers – I was just very struck by them. I don’t know what happened to our comments from yesterday. Maybe Blogger’s still messing around with restoring things. If I remember correctly, I asked you, when you came across the word “singing,” why wouldn’t you have thought it meant something more like “howling.”
Yes, that’s what you asked. And here’s what I said. It’s a fine distinction, between singing and howling, that’s true. But although I’m not very musically inclined myself, I am fond of music, and I’ve spent many hours, as you know, in the music room listening to you play the piano and sing, so I should know something about what singing is. But it’s true: at the time I picked out the symbols “singing,” “song,” and “sang” in “The Adventures of Taxi Dog,” I probably didn’t make the distinction in my own mind. That would have come later when I came across the word “howling,” as I did in a caption to a picture in the book “White Fang.” Maybe we can discuss that later. But for now I think you should ask me about this. In the same passage from which I selected the words “singing,” “song,” and “sang” as denoting the prominent actions in the accompanying illustration, the word “a” occurs three times and “she” (or “She”) occurs twice. Why didn’t I think one of those words might refer to the action? M.
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