May 15, 2010. Saturday.
Situation: Moi and I both work tonight, but at separate places (Moi also has Jazz’s shower to go to). I take Mway out about 3:30. Earlier today I did some wash and hung my clothes outside – and I realized how much I enjoy hanging up clothes: just being outside without being surrounded by weeds.
State of the Path: Moi asks me today (instead of me asking her something) what kind of tree it is that she’s hung her jar candles on. After consulting these notes, I tell her a boxelder, but when I’m out by the old orchard, I see that the jar candle is hanging on a different kind of tree – maybe a sumac or a scraggly black walnut, a pity of a tree whatever it is, with a skinny crooked trunk, leaves only growing on a few branches, and a grape vine growing over on top of it. Later I see that Moi has jar candles on two other trees down closer by her wigwams – these are hanging on, I’m not sure, what look like small ash trees, small trees intermixed with the maples. I scare a robin out of a multiflora bush by the hedgerow – the second time I do this (but I forgot to mention it before). Wherever I see a fresh green blackberry shoot coming up, I step on it to keep it from growing. Down at the feed channel before the skating pond, I take a closer look at the honeysuckle bush I have to cling to to cross the channel and what’s growing around it. The honeysuckle grows right into a Russian olive shrub, which grows right into another shrub, let’s call it a red willow, and they all grow right into a cedar that stands behind them, and there’s also a multiflora bush mixed in there somehow, because you see its briars sticking up in the air. Then behind the cedar, there are some more honeysuckles bushes, all this in front of a huge maple growing along the creek. In bug land, just before the pines, there are some new blue flowers that are spreading across the grass among the point-blue-eyed grass. I’ll have to ask Moi if she knows what this is.
State of the Creek: When we get down to the creek, Mway wades into it and takes a drink of water. Minnows are back in the pool at the log jam. A few water striders, frogs, along the way. At one place the water of the creek is only about two feet wide, as it passes over rocks between the more permanent bank where the path is and a grassy buildup of dirt on the other side, over which the water would pass if the water were higher.
The Fetch: I bring one of Mway’s smaller sticks today, one I found among a bunch of others in the music room, all shedding their bark on the rug. After about four fetches, Mway, instead of dropping the stick at my feet, holds it in her mouth, growls, and backsteps, indicating to me she wants to play the game where I whip my hand and tell her “Put it down!” Usually I only do this once, but today I do it a second time, a third time, and finally a fourth time, before I turn around and we take off down the path past the sumacs back to the house. Along the path, on either side, are a bunch of dead blackberry canes. Today I encounter a living cane with new leaves blocking the path, its tip growing into the dead canes on the other side of the path. I pull it aside, so that it leans away from the path.
2 comments:
So you were learning a rule of grammar?
That’s right. I was starting to look at words in combination, and I was looking at them separate from the pictures. Consider that passage in “The Adventures of Taxi Dog” about the dog and the woman singing. You have the words “was singing,” “I sang,” and “She broke into a song.” From what I was learning about articles, I could bet that “song” had to be some kind of thing having to do with singing. The same was true for the word “ride.” I found “I ride,” “I could ride,” “We’ll ride,” but at the end of the book “a ride.” I had never quite thought of an action as a thing before -- but what do you know? M.
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