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 17, 2011

Something Like a Mayweed, But Not Like a Mayweed

June 17, 2010.  Thursday.
Situation:  Moi has taken Atlas back to Jazz’s, where she finds it easier to dog sit him, although she’s going to have to come back this afternoon, with Atlas in tow, to work tonight.  I also work tonight (I worked last night too), and I’ve decided not to do any work this afternoon.  Moi has given me explicit instructions to take Mway on a good, long walk, so she won’t feel obliged to give her one when she gets back.  This morning, of course, I had to let the chickens out etc., and I threw morning stick for Mway out in the back yard, after which I fed her.  I take her out for a walk about 12:45, a moment that Mway has waited for all morning, lying patiently in the music room.
State of the Path:  I bring the hedge clippers along with me, figuring that a good, long walk constitutes clipping back some of the weeds.  I don’t clip anything, though, unless it’s something really leaning into the path: any kind of briar, like a multiflora or a blackberry, and some of the shrubs, the honeysuckles and the red willows near bug land.  A lot of the goldenrod needs to be cut down, but this requires more work, which I don’t feel like doing today.  Along the orchard and down by the creek, I help myself to any raspberry which I see has ripened.  Near the swale to bug land, I note again a wildflower I saw the other day, with tiny white flowers and fern-like leaves.  I wonder to myself if this might be mayweed, since I read the other day that mayweed has fern-like leaves.  But looking again at the picture in Audubon, I see clearly that, whatever this plant might be, it’s not mayweed; and I don’t see any other candidate among the pictures.
State of the Creek:  The only movement of water I see today are ripples caused by skating water striders and plopping frogs.  In one of the pools, I watch the striders for a while, as two of them skate over to a fallen flower petal, each of them rejecting it as something inedible.  In the water, I notice some lit up spots, the sun obviously shining down, but near them I see some foggy areas, like smoke plumes in the water – I can’t figure out what this might be, except perhaps for shadows caused by leaves.   
The Fetch:  This morning Mway fetched the “pro-quality” stick for a good, long time, and she does so again after we arrive at the clearing, where, also, we continue our work of keeping the goldenrod trampled down.

2 comments:

sisyphus gregor said...

Yes, Moi probably eventually picked many of the books up off the floor and, depending on their condition, threw them out, stored them away somewhere, or gave them to the town library. I can look around for you, see what I can find, although I hate to go up in the attic because of all the batshit up there. The Little Golden Books are ones that I also read, or were read to me, when I was a little boy, “Scuffy the Tugboat” being a favorite. A highly improbable ending – but I would probably enjoy the book now as much as I did back then.

Anonymous said...

What I was encountering, of course, in “Once upon a time there was an old man and an old woman and a little boy,” without my knowing it, was a passive sentence with an expletive and a postponed subject. The problem was that I had already become accustomed to the basic sentence, subject-verb-object, “I [have] run [from a little] boy.” I said a couple a days ago that I had begun to see “once upon a time” as an adverbial phrase of some sort, but, in truth, I vacillated between that and treating the whole passive sentence as an active sentence. There, the sentence was telling me, was something called “a time” that was doing something to a man, a woman, and a boy. What time was doing was “there was” them – time was “therely wasing” or “thering wasily” an old man, an old woman, and a little boy. I’d look at the picture, trying to figure out what object could be doing something to three people sitting in a room and reading a book, the one holding a cup. Could it be that “a time there was” was the room containing them, the chairs holding them, the book entertaining them, the cup enticing them, a breeze from the window blowing over them? I didn’t know. The visual cues in the picture didn’t allow me to settle upon any of these possibilities. M.