May 18, 2010. Tuesday.
Situation: Work early afternoon, and when I get home Moi has managed, on this rainy day, to burn all the trash, some of which has been piling up in the walled garden and around the outbuilding, as she admits, since Christmas. Moi has to go back to work from late afternoon into the evening, so she and Mway go upstairs to take a nap, and I go to my own room to rest. They’ve now gotten up, Moi has gone, and Mway is looking at me imploringly and following me around the house, wondering about her walk. I’m ready to take her out (at about 4:15); it’s not raining hard, but I’m not looking forward to getting my feet wet from walking through cold wet weeds.
State of the Path: Cold enough today for the denim jacket. Note the bare spots of ground, ringed with weeds and high grass, where the trash had been lying. Just beyond the walled garden, a number of hedge garlic plants are bent over from the rain and sticking out into the path. Feel the cold of wet rain seeping into my socks, and decide to skip the side paths today. Two honeysuckle bushes flank the path before the sumacs, and from either side nearly meet each other in the middle. Beyond the sumacs, the sweet grass is bent over and bejeweled with water droplets. The path is a little muddy down by the wigwams and over the seeps of bug land. I take a look at the green flowering shrub – but no change from yesterday. Under the pin oaks, I see movement in the jewelweed, and think for a moment it might be a mouse or a vole. I part the jewelweed, and a frog hops away from me deeper into the weeds. Just beyond the tree stand, two honeysuckles bushes (which I partially trimmed back the other day) do meet each other in the middle of the path and form an archway just high enough for me to pass under. I look out at the trees along bug land (the ones which are now in white flower) and can just barely make out (as much as my old contact lenses allow) that these are indeed locust trees, like the two I’ve already noted closer to the creek. Just a little ways ahead, I stop under some oak trees, noting what I think are about two or three smaller trees and one huge tree growing along the creek bank, and try to decide whether the leaves are pin or black oak. But when I look straight up into the crown of the big tree, I’m puzzled to see, at the very top branches, leaves that look like locust leaves. I step forward a little to change my angle of view and finally realize that the big tree is a locust tree, which is hedged in by the two or three smaller oaks. Walking along the ridge around bug land, I look back at the trees along the creek and am surprised to see (judging from the white flowers) how many locusts there are: they are all lined up along the edge of bug land, with their tall skinny trunks leaning outward. Moi’s willow is there among them, leaning even more precariously than the locusts.
State of the Creek: You can see the water flowing over the rocks today, but the pools remain dark and still.
The Fetch: Bring along the “pro-quality” stick, again because that was the only one on the bench. But Mway fetches it today like it was any other stick, more times than I care to count, even catching it on a bounce on one toss. Toward the end of her bout of fetches, we play “Put it down!” twice.
2 comments:
We’re probably getting way ahead of ourselves. You were suppose to be telling me how a dog learns where a book begins.
We are getting way ahead of ourselves, but that’s okay. So many things happen at once. Words and concepts implode, explode, re-implode. But we’re already seeing how narrative can teach a dog where a book begins. Witness “The Adventures of Taxi Dog.” The first picture nearest the sinistral end of the book shows the dog riding in a taxi. Okay, that’s what the whole story is about. The next picture shows the dog walking alone down the sidewalk with its head down. You might first think that the story is going to be about a man abandoning his pet, but then in the next picture the man is lovingly greeting the dog on the sidewalk, and subsequent pictures all show the dog and the man together. It’s true, if you thought in the opposite direction, you could deduce that the story is about abandonment, but then the first picture, which is a summation of the theme, doesn’t make much sense – it abruptly shows the dog back in the taxi, without a cause for it. So you see, you can pick up a sense of the proper orientation of a book from narrative, which generally follows the natural order in which things occur, and you make the simple assumption that words move in the same direction. M.
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