The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names. (E. O. Wilson, as cited by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal, Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson)

Friday, June 10, 2011

Snagging Briars, Dew-Splattering Weeds, and a Vine that Trips Me

June 10, 2010.  Thursday.
Situation:   Today I have to work most of the day, as well as tonight, so I’ve decided to take Mway for a walk this morning.  Moi hasn’t taken her out, because, as she says, it’s too wet in the morning; I’m braced for getting wet: after the walk I will change my clothes and take a shower.  Yesterday it rained steadily most of the day, and I’m curious to see what the creek looks like.  Outside my office window, I see more flowers on the day lilies by the summer house, but they haven’t yet completely opened up.  It’s now 9:14.
State of the Path:   Beyond the walled garden I’m immediately confronted by a path clogged with weeds bent over from rain.  A few of the weeds I notice are some of the remaining hedge garlic, but most of the weeds that clog the path are the tall grasses, let’s call them, the red grass.  I can see beads of water on their stems, perhaps rain from last night, but more likely dew from this morning.  My pants and socks immediately start taking in water, and as I brush past bushes, my shirt does so as well.  Although Mway starts down the side path by the old orchard, I just head straight toward the creek, my shirt catching on the frequent blackberry briars.  When I get down to the seeps in bug land, I’m suddenly faced with a path totally obliterated by flattened red grass.  I no longer can see the ground, and I can do nothing but wade through the sea of grass, guessing where the path might be from memory of past walks.  By the time I get to the creek my pants and socks are soaked.
State of the Creek:  The water again is visibly trickling through the rocks.  At places the sun shines down through the trees, causing the stationary pools to sparkle.  I trip over the loopy grape vine, hidden now in weeds.  There’s no water in the swale from bug land, which is now clogged with weeds and red willows, but there is water again in the feed channel, making me hesitant to cross it, but I do.  All along I hear birds chirping like a radio and scolding me, but I can see nothing flying but white butterflies, some of which I’m sure must be cabbage butterflies.  Coming along the ridge along bug land, I take note that some of the red grass here indeed has spikelets that are red.
The Fetch:  Mway fetches the “pro-quality” stick more times than I care to count; we play “Put it down” once, and she might have played it a second time, but I’m eager to get back to the house.  Walking along the path through the briars, I suddenly see a yellow bird fly into the sumacs.  I don’t get a long look at it – could it be a gold finch, like the ones I used to see along the back hedgerow?   Just before the walled garden, I catch sight of some day lilies (I knew a patch of them grew here, but I had forgotten about them), their orange petals opened for the day.   When I get back to the house, I decide to hang my wet pants, shirt, and socks on the clothesline; they will dry here better than they would on a heap at the foot of my bed.

2 comments:

sisyphus gregor said...

I might not own a copy. Read a long time ago. So what new words were you learning?

Anonymous said...

Well, “you” to begin with – which I learned by comparing the constantly repeated “I have run away from a little boy” and so forth with “I can run away from you” – “you” emerging as the hat worn by whoever was being spoken to. And the Gingerbread Man, wearing the “I” hat, could suddenly take it off and put on the “you” hat, when the various creatures say “’Oh you can, can you?’,” the repetitious word “said” now emerging as the action word meaning “to speak,” along with other words in syntactically similar positions, “shouted” and “called out.” The word “he” started making sense, as the hat worn temporarily by various creatures, the boy, the bear, the wolf, even the Gingerbread man, when no one seemed to be speaking. “She” was the hat sometimes worn by the old woman. I even started making some sense of the words “have” and “can,” the former seeming to indicate the action of running already having taken place, the latter an action of running in the future. When “can” appeared without “run,” as in “’Oh you can, can you?’,” I simply assumed it still meant a proposed action of running. Many verbs started making some sense: “watch,” “put,” “sit,” “came.” “Catch” I was beginning to understand, although the “n’t” to the right of the word “can” in the phrase “You can’t catch me” confused me. But “me” I could figure out: it was the same as “I” when “you” appeared first. I thought I could even make some sense of the words “fast” and “faster,” as somehow pertaining to the action of running, as well as the adjective “away” and the preposition “from.” My understanding of words was not always accurate – “can,” for example, meant nothing different to me from “will” – but I was learning so many new words so fast I decided one day to try to read the whole Gingerbread Man story from the beginning without looking at any of the pictures. M.