June 14, 2010. Monday.
Situation: I have to work tonight (though it’s what’s called a “freebie”), and I should also try to do some work this afternoon. So, since Moi didn’t take Mway for a morning walk, I decide to take her for one, to save me some time later today. It’s about 11:30. My walking clothes are still damp from last evening, not having dried at the foot of my bed.
State of the Path: Day lilies are in bloom in record numbers, in front of the house, around the summer house, by Moi’s garden pond, and across from the pig pen. (I had a couple spent blossoms in my stir fry this morning.) Mway turns down the side path, but there is still dew or rain on the weeds, and I march straight ahead on the main path, Mway quickly following. I look at the mullein, and I note definitively that its flowers are pink; so I think it’s not the moth mullein as pictured in Audubon, but I still believe it’s some species of mullein. Just down from the mullein, I note another flowering plant; it has pink flowers in a kind of carnation shape, large soft leaves and a thick, perhaps hollow, stem. I suspect milkweed, and, lo and behold, what I see is very clearly pictured in Audubon under the entry for common milkweed. (I know milkweed, of course, with its pod, but I’ve never really noticed its flowers before.) Down by the creek, I realize just how many black raspberries there are along the bank near the deer stand; some of the berries are starting to turn black, but they’re not yet ripe enough for picking. Today, I also become suddenly cognizant of how much fleabane there is in flower; I see it in places all along the path; I see a rather sizable patch just before the clearing, and I even see a few flowers in the clearing itself.
State of the Creek: Mway walks into the water in a pool beneath the large locust trees. Despite the rain, the creek is still not that high; there’s just a little bit of water in the feed channel.
The Fetch: Toss the “pro-quality” stick, standing a little ways into the goldenrod. The stick whips at the weeds as I wind back for one of the tosses, and Mway’s body whips against them as she dashes after the stick. The fleabane jiggles as she runs past the flowers. More fetches today than I care to count.
2 comments:
So, getting back to your attempts to read without pictures -- seems like iconicity was abandoning you.
A little bit, yes, but not quite. I realized it was too soon to forgo the pictures and pondered the opening of Gingerbread Man again. “Once upon a time there was an old man and an old woman and a little boy.” Of course, I knew what “man,” “woman,” and “boy” were, and they were pictured there in the illustration, the man in a chair, holding a cup, and the boy and the woman on a sofa, reading a book (could it be the very book that told their story? I wondered – not likely, because the cover was blank. Maybe it was a book of blank pages, maybe that’s the type of book nonexistent beings read). I didn’t quite know what “old” and “little” meant, but I was getting an inkling that these words were descriptors of some sort, a word, appearing between an article and a noun, that distinguished, say, “the old man” from “the gingerbread man.” “And” had me stymied for a while. It seemed to be positioned like a verb (old man “sits near” an old woman “sits near” a little boy?), but “and” cropped up all over the place in the book: it seemed more like a filler word, stringing things together (“And the little boy and the old man and the old woman had to sit down to rest”), and, in thinking thusly, I was thinking more or less correctly. “Time” I knew had be a thing of some sort, for there was an article in front of it. Did it mean “room”? But I was finding “time” elsewhere, in “The Adventures of Taxi Dog,” for example, in “Each time we pick up a fare,” “One time a big lady,” “We made it in time,” “Come join us next time,” with no rooms about. Nor was there an article, but various different words in front of “time” instead: “each,” “one,” “in,” “next.” Yet, the similarity between “One time” and “Once upon a time” did not escape me, and in connecting the two passages, in seeing that these words kind of announced the appearance of a thing, I was not far off the proper meaning. That left two words that baffled me: “there was.” I was still looking for a verb in the sentence, some sort of action that the man, the woman, and the boy were all doing, and it seemed to me that it had to be there somehow in that “there was.” M.
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