An Eruption of Growls

June 26, 2010.  Saturday.

Situation:  Again I have the morning chores and morning walk to handle.  Pour the water for the coffee, turn on the computer, heat up some canned cat food for Squeak and put it on top of the refrigerator (Moi says she won’t eat this unless it’s nuked for ten seconds; and today she doesn’t eat it anyway), open up the chicken cage to let the chickens out, see that they have water, and throw out some feed for them.  Mway and I are on the path by 9:15 or so.  I remember to bring along the clippers.

State of the Path:  Day lilies still in blaze.  I’m impressed by the amount of fleabane that has come up along the old orchard.  I don’t eat any raspberries.  If the honeysuckle berries were edible, I would eat some of them because there sure are a lot of them.  I wonder if the shrub-like plant I’ve been trying to identify is a type of honeysuckle because it seems to me that the buds are arising from leaf axils; could this be a later blooming honeysuckle, perhaps Tartarian honeysuckle?  The leaves and stems look pretty close to the picture in Audubon; but I’ll have to be patient and wait for the flowers to bloom more.  The jack-in-the-pulpits, though their leaves are brown, are still erect, and they’re holding onto their green corn-like fruit, waiting for them I guess to fall to the ground.  The elberberry berries are still green; I’m waiting for them to turn purple.  I go along the crest of the skating pond.  Although red grass is the main plant growing in the pond, some catty-nine-tails seem to be sticking up, even though the pond is probably dry.  See some mosquito-like bugs (mosquitoes perhaps?) stuck together, in mating position, near the feed channel.  Along bug land before the evergreens, the little purple flowers are still there; I’ll probably have to bring my Audubon along with me before I have any hope of identifying them.  The St. johnswort is still growing along the path beyond the ridge, and the poison ivy is doing well on the way to the clearing.

State of the Creek:  Mway approaches the creek before I do and heads to the pool under the tree stand where she regularly cools off and takes a sip of water.  Just as I pass under the pin oaks, I hear an eruption of loud growls coming from where Mway just went.  I hurry around the honeysuckle, worried that Mway might be getting hurt, and am relieved to see a mother raccoon and two of her children scurrying up the tree on the far bank.  As the raccoons cling to the branches and look down at me, Mway comes back to my side on the path.  We head down the path, and Mway starts to turn back, but I tell her to stay with me. 

The Fetch:   Up at the clearing, Mway fetches the “pro-quality” stick more times than I care to throw it.  We play “Put it down,” and it looks like she would like to play it at least a second time, but I turn around to head down the path along the sumacs.  Mway passes me before the end of the clearing, and while she runs to the house, I stay behind to clip back briars, goldenrod, sumac saplings, and whatever other weed is impinging on the path.