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)

Monday, July 18, 2011

Blackberries an Inch Long or More

July 18, 2010.  Sunday.
Situation:  Work all day today, get home shortly before 7.  The Boy is still around, waiting for traffic to slow down before returning to NYC, so I have just a short time to take Mway for a walk before seeing him off.
State of the Path:  Just a quick walk down to the creek and back.  The moth mullein is growing taller, but no flowers have bloomed on it yet.  Eat a number of blackberries.  Above the ridge before the clearing, there’s a copious stand of ripe blackberries, a lot of them an inch long or more.  Would be good to gather them up in a bowel, eat them with milk and sugar, if I didn’t worry about seeds in my teeth.  (I’m afraid I might have a seed in my cracked molar, right now as I write.)
State of the Creek:  The creek is, more or less, still a creek.  But becoming less of one, as the water goes down in the runs of rocks between the pools.
The Fetch:   After a few fetches, Mway gets me playing “Put it down” more times than I care to count.   After a while, I wonder if she’s egging me on, or if I’m the one egging her on.  Eventually she pauses for a moment at the red willow where she’s picked up the stick, before returning to me, and I take this as a cue that’s she’s had enough.

2 comments:

sisyphus gregor said...

No. It just sounded natural to me – colloquial, you know. But I guess if I analyzed what was going on there, you have an appositive, “dumb me,” substituting for the omitted subject “I.” Instead of “Dumb me. I should have known yarrow,” you have the elliptic “Dumb me should have known yarrow,” ellipses being common enough in headlines or titles.

Anonymous said...

Apposition, ellipsis – sure, I can fairly smack myself in the head: I should have known that. I don’t know the colloquial first-hand, but I know it well enough from my reading. For instance:
‘EH? Wot I say? I spik true w’en I say dat Buck two devils.’
Or:
Hurroo! Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw Hielentman’s your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot boil! My tipple.
I knows the rules, and knows when to break ‘em, knows when to fetch a lot, ‘n’ when not to. M.