May 7, 2010. Friday.
Situation: Like yesterday I work tonight, and have to do some other work in the late afternoon, so I take May out about 12:30. I bring along my Audubon tree book, with the hope of identifying at least one or two trees today.
State of the Path: The first tree is the fairly young one growing up near the outbuilding that I mentioned the other day. It’s growing right at the edge of a cement slab that used to be the foundation of a small outbuilding connected to the springhouse (now the chicken coop), which was ravaged by poison ivy when we moved in and I had to tear down. On the slab are a couple of rusting metal coolers, which we don’t use for anything, and growing over them are some grape vines. The tree has distinctive leaves, tooth-edged and deeply lobed, almost like a maple, with the leaves varying in the way they are lobed, like a sassafras tree. I soon find a photo (page 237) that matches exactly what I’m looking at – it is a photo of a white mulberry. But when I read the entry for that tree I get confused, for there is yet another photo of a white mulberry (page 154) that looks nothing like the other photo or what I’m looking at – what kind of tree is this, that doesn’t look like itself? Just beyond the white mulberry, there are three big trees, which almost hold up the outbuilding – they are covered in shrubs and vines, and I look up to see what kind of leaves they have; these trees are some kind of ash or hickory, I’m not sure. Past the walled garden and just before the pig pen, I see Virginia creeper coming up. The next tree I try to identify is the one that I mentioned before just before the pin oaks near the creek. It has drooping oblong leaves, that seem to come in triplets, with two more smaller leaves on the same stem behind it – I find nothing like it in the Audubon. As I walk along the creek, I’m happy to make acquaintance with the wider path at the log jam. I see the branches of the honeysuckle I lopped off yesterday lying on the ground, and I don’t miss that particular bush at all. At the head of the log jam, I see the tree growing there is another locust of some kind, and around its trunk too is growing a honeysuckle.
State of the Creek: Mway goes into the creek just behind the big log at the log jam, explores on the opposite bank for a while, then reenters the creek above the jam, and walks along in the shallow water. As I approach the big ash trees, I hear a pecking sound – and lo, soon I see a woodpecker pecking at the dead trunk of the big maple on the other side of the creek. I think this is my redbellied friend, but he looks a lot bigger and his beak has grown. Mway scares him off from the trunk and he flies off to a more distant branch, where he starts trilling away in anger, but I do get a chance to see him briefly, pecking away at the dead wood just like a woodpecker should.
The Fetch: Up at the clearing, I stand at one edge and throw one of Mway’s smaller sticks. She fetches it more times than I care to count. Today I make a conscious effort to try to get her to run across the whole length of the clearing, because I note today that the grass and the goldenrod (each taking up about half the clearing) is starting to get higher, and I’d like to use Mway as much as I can to keep it tramped down, though I know, at least in the case of the goldenrod, that it will be much higher before the end of the summer.
2 comments:
I remember the book you’re talking about – reading it to the kids. And I can appreciate your perplexity before it, because there was a narrative to it, quite a bit of text to the book, certainly more than a one-to-one correspondence between word and picture. I’m curious – can you remember the titles to any of the latter type of books. I can’t remember any specific books like that – I’m sure we must have had them when the kids were very young, but they were in their late teens by the time you came around.
I can’t recall the titles right now, but that may because I didn’t understand them at the time. A title such as “My First Words” wouldn’t have made much sense to me, because it was some time before I learned the word for “word,” not to mention “my” and “first.” And often I’d find a useful book, and then it would disappear into a box in the attic. It wasn’t as if I was encountering the easiest books first. Many of the first nouns I learned were gleaned from some volumes of an out-of-date World Book Encyclopedia you had lying on the floor of your office, particularly the “A” volume. I especially liked this book because almost every time I nosed it open the pages flipped to the “ANIMAL” article, which contained illustrations of many animals, quite a few of which I recognized and many more of which I didn’t, but which for a time I hoped to encounter on a walk (as you know, even to this day, when I get overexcited, I think I might come across an African elephant or an orang-utan.) Here of course I was making associations between the pictures and the boldfaced guide and key words. The “ANIMAL” article was easy to understand, but some of the articles left me perplexed – for example, the articles on “ADVERTISING,” “AIR,” and “ATOMIC ENERGY” – looking at the illustrations I couldn’t make head or tails what these words might be referring to. And you’ll note that the guide words are all in majuscules – this caused a problem for a while: being unable to recognize that “AIRPORT” is the same word as “airport.” In the “Adventures of Taxi Dog” I found the latter word, close to an illustration of the same strange object pictured in the article “AIRPORT.” It was only because I found the same strange object in each place that I began to recognize a similarity between certain majuscules and minuscules – “I” and “i,” “P” and “p,” “O” and “o.” And still for a long time I thought the word stood for the strange, long-shaped object, and because many miniscules look like sagging majuscules I also thought that an “airport,” in contrast to an “AIRPORT,” was one of those strange objects that was old, decrepit, and slowly shrinking from sight. M.
Post a Comment