June 8, 2010. Tuesday.
Situation: Work late morning, all afternoon, take Mway out when I get home, about 5 pm. Moi says she already took Mway out for an afternoon fetch and fed her – so why do I take her for a walk?
State of the Path: I look in stupefaction at all the different types of grass; an online search last night didn’t yield any good sites to help me with identifying them. One grass that intrigues me has wooly spikelets like wool grass, but it doesn’t look quite like the picture of wool grass in the Audubon. Underneath the one stand of jack-in-the-pulpits, I brush back the leaves with my stick and uncover what I’ve never seen before: two fruits. They look like little ears of corn with green kernels. I whack down a bunch of blackberry brambles. I do notice there are some black raspberries, but again this year not as many as there are blackberries. Gone completely now are the white flowers of the multiflora bushes: like the honeysuckles, except for the ones that are now bearing bright red berries, they have receded into green anonymity. As I walk up toward the clearing, I think to myself that the strawberry patch should be called the poison ivy patch. The sumacs are bearing green flowers.
State of the Creek: Mway disappears for a while, but then reappears as I start walking along the creek. She wades into a pool of water and takes a sip, after I take note of a spot in the creek which is mostly grown up with jewelweed and other weeds.
The Fetch: Mway almost walks across the whole clearing without stopping. But when I call her back she ends up fetching the “pro-quality” stick more times than I care to count. Walking back on the path, I see a blackberry bramble leaning across it. Since Mway now has the stick, I have no means of brushing it out of the way, except to step on it at the base and smash it to the ground.
3 comments:
Had you thought at first that Taxi Dog, the little boy, and the Gingerbread Man were real beings?
I suppose in the back of my mind I was a little disappointed to realize now that these beings weren’t all quite real. But I might point out that in the back matter of “The Adventures of Taxi Dog,” the publisher states that the authors were inspired to write their book “after riding in a taxi whose owner kept his dog with him in the front seat.” And the fable of the Gingerbread Man, one can imagine, might also be based on a real incident, perhaps on a cookie that was once dropped and rolled across the floor as the various people and animals of the household scrambled after it. Certainly little boys, old men and women, bears, wolves, and foxes are real, are they not? But the point I’m trying to make is that I was now being swept away by words, whether what they referred to were real or not. “All for nothing, for Hecuba!” And in this frame of mind, I was learning many new words that I probably would not have learned otherwise. M.
In re-reading through this blog since the last post on December 24, 2011, I feel compelled to add a comment here (even though it breaks an unwritten rule I made about it – as it does so only slightly). In general, whereas I like books and movies that focus on style (Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Lucas’s THX-1138), Moi, although she appreciates style, tends to like “true” stories, even if they are implausibly true, such as stories of the supernatural (witness her many books on surviving in the Arctic, on the one hand, and her many books of ghost stories, on the other – her favorite story, she’s told me, is London’s To Build A Fire, her favorite movie Jaws). (Sometimes we can get together on something we both like, at least in TV shows – Northern Exposure, Monk, even Breaking Bad.) In this blog, I realize today, I’ve been catering, whether intentionally or not, ironically or not, more to Moi’s tastes than my own. As for M’s tastes --I’m not sure how to characterize them.
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