July 16, 2010. Friday.
Situation: Last night Moi closed the bedroom door on Mway, and Mway was forced to sleep in the hall all night. This morning, Moi tells me, Mway acted very ashamed, refusing to eat, skulking around the house, and hiding for more than an hour in the bushes outside. Although Moi last night chided me for not hosing Mway down, as far as I know Moi hasn’t washed Mway either, and the dog might still stink. I have to work tonight, and I plan to take Mway for a walk sometime this afternoon. Mway lies down in the corner of the music room, and periodically throughout the morning, I can smell the stench coming from her. Finally around 11:30 I decide I need some air, and get ready to take Mway out.
State of the Path: In the walled garden, Mway sniffs a bag of trash, then wanders around, knowing there’s a ground hog somewhere around here. I take off down the path, then, thinking I don’t want her rolling in anything, call Mway to follow. She soon comes shooting down the path behind me. I sniff the air down by the wigwams, but I don’t smell any odor, although perhaps the breeze is carrying it away today. I’ve brought the Audubon along with me, and my focus is to try to identify decisively what that Queen-Anne’s-lace-like plant is. I look carefully at a specimen down near the swale from bug land, but I’m still hampered by a photo that doesn’t show what the leaves look like, and I can’t find anywhere on the plant the “one dark reddish-brown floret usually at center of umbel.” Then walking along the ridge around bug land, I see a new purple wildflower growing all over the place. I think to myself, “Damn, here’s another wildflower I won’t be able to identify,” but I throw off my gloves and start leafing through the Audubon anyway. I really despair at finding what I’m looking for, because I can’t even describe what the flower looks like, with some big bulbous thing in the middle of the tiny purple petals. But to my amazement, after a short while, I come across a photo that matches what I’m looking at exactly. It’s a photo of a heal-all. The big bulbous thing, which I think must be part of the flower, is described as the “square stem [that] has dense, cylindrical terminal spikes of purple flowers.”
State of the Creek: Hear what sounds like a bullfrog coming up from Hutchinson
The Fetch: Up at the clearing, I take my stance next to some of the Queen-Anne’s-lace type plant, and then I see right next to it something that looks very much like it – another plant, I think, that maybe really is Queen Anne’s lace, for it has an umbel, I guess you’d call it, that looks like something in the Audubon photo. I throw down my gloves and take out the book, ignoring Mway, who’s waiting for me to throw the stick. She eventually takes off, as I try to decide which plant before me is actually Queen Anne’s lace and which is something else, perhaps poisonous hemlock. I’ve also tried to look up both plants online, and have found that wikipedia states that Queen Anne’s lace is often confused with poison hemlock; I realize this is my predicament, and have yet to find a photo that will clear up my confusion. After a while, I call Mway back to the clearing. She fetches the stick twice. I think she only fetches it twice because I’ve taken her for a walk in the middle of the day, after which she won’t get a cup of food in her dish. Whatever I may have theorized before, I believe that Mway loosely associates fetching the stick with getting fed, and whenever she realizes that a walk is not at feeding time she doesn’t feel obligated to fetch the stick very many times. Back in the back yard, Mways jumps in her little wading pool to cool off, and leaves the stick crosswise on the rim, as she’s been doing the past several days. The larger pool, that’s where I’m going to jump into now.
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I’m back home this morning – well, M., you already know that. I have a busy day today and won’t be around most of the day, so I’m only going to leave the computer on for a short while in the morning. An email that I sent to Moi from NYC early Friday morning says a lot about what I did there – except for the harrowing drive home with the Boy.
Moi,
So the Trac-Fone worked just as it was suppose to and I was able to rendezvous with the Boy at Columbus Circle. He gave me a tour of the CBS Broadcast Facility, then we ate some Chinese food. After that I went to his apartment where I was able to take a nap. When the Boy got off work, he put his bass in his car and we went down to the place where he jams. This is actually a room in a Korean church, which Max, the saxophone player and a member of the church, has gotten permission to open up as a rehearsal facility for anyone who plays jazz. It's really very nice. The church has a parking garage, which the Boy could just pull into when we got there. The room has a piano, a drum set, amplifiers, microphones. And you could go up on the roof for a smoke break. There were four of us playing, Max, the Boy, and I, and a drummer named Reese. After that, the Boy had planned for us to go back into Manhattan to listen to some music, but he felt too tired to do that, so he, his roommate Marsha, his friend Tim, and I went instead to a place in his neighborhood called the Beer Garden. It reminded me of something Knouse's Valley would have if they served beer at their amusement park.
I was able to get in touch with Marion by email. I heard back from him right away, but he was emailing me from Cape Cod. The bus ride to NYC was long, but much more interesting than a drive on the interstate. It pretty much went through every coal town on the way there, and I wasn't able to sleep on it at all -- maybe just for a minute while I was listening to the mantra-like noises of the bus engine, its transmission system, and its seats rattling. After you left me off, I talked for a bit to that guy who was sitting in the doorway waiting for the bus. He told me that he lives in L______ and works in M__ U______. To commute from his home to work, he takes the bus from L_____ to S_______, then rides his bike 75 miles or so all the way down Route XXX past L_______ to M__ U______. When we saw him, he had just come back from M__ U_____ --- apparently after having ridden on his bike all night on XXX. He had disassembled his bike and had it put together in a box for conveyance on the bus. I didn't try to continue talking to him once we got on the bus, because I figured he needed some sleep. He looked very peaceful in his bus seat, with his sweatshirt hood over his head. After he got out at L_______, as the bus was pulling away, I could see him in the park, reassembling his bike, folding up the box he had stored it in, and inspecting his tires very carefully.
I am getting used to my Trac-Fone, getting less afraid of using it and somehow incurring a big expense for something I did accidentally. I guess that won't happen. The Boy has to work today till around 8, then we'll be coming back. I don't know what I'll do today. Walk around a lot, maybe go visit my old neighborhood.
See you tonight,
Sis
I’m very glad you’re back. I wasn’t able to do any writing while you were gone. I couldn’t even read Ulysses with any enjoyment. I would read along, get an idea for my essay, and then because I couldn’t write it down, just feel the idea evaporate from my head. Thanks for leaving out The Call of the Wild. I had forgotten how good it is. Still, it will not compare favorably to Ulysses in my essay. Did you ride in a taxi while you were in NYC? M.
Feel compelled to make this note regarding my certain identification of a heal-all, as mentioned above. This year, during this hot Spring we’ve been having, a particular plant has been coming up profusely on our land (and in other waste places), and a couple weeks ago, Moi wondered what it was. I told her, based on what I learned above, that it was heal-all, but I had to admit I was also perplexed to see so much of it coming up at this time of year. Moi, for whatever reason, didn’t believe it was heal-all, and she’s had us both scratching our heads trying to figure out what it is. Online you will easily learn that heal-all can be confused with other plants: ground ivy or gill-of-the-ground, henbit (a nice name because it reminds me of “hen pecked) and dead-nettle (another nice name). Today I was inclined to think that maybe the plant was gill-of-the-ground growing wildly in the hot weather, but when I got home from work, Moi, who has all day to think about this, showed me a specimen she put in a vase on the kitchen window sill, with its leaves varying from green to red, and proclaimed that it was not heal-all, or ground ivy, or even henbit, but dead-nettle. I’ve just gone online and have finally found some pictures of what’s called purple dead-nettle, which, sure enough, is a deadringer for what we’ve been seeing. This means, of course, that I am no longer sure what I saw on July 16, 2010. It probably was purple dead-nettle – but who knows?
I realize I’m still somewhat confused about what I say above. I’ve looked again online at various pictures, and it appears there are two very similar species, one called in Latin Lamium purpureum, or, in English, Red or Purple Deadnettle or Purple Archangel, the other Lamium amplexicaule, or Henbit Deadnettle or Greater Henbit. What we’ve been seeing this year and what I saw in 2010 could be either species for all I know. Wikipedia says they can be distinguished “by the stalked leaves of Red Deadnettle on the flower stem, compared to the unstalked leaves of Henbit Deadnettle” -- but I don’t know what this means.
Last night at our Saturday night job, where Moi first asked me about this plant I first said was heal-all, we saw, growing along the railroad tracks there, two similar looking, but slightly different, plants. I was now in the position to declare, “I bet the one is what they call purple or red dead nettle and the other is what’s called henbit or henbit dead nettle.” We gathered a sample of each and later that night confirmed my identification online. The author of the helpful wikipedia article perhaps meant to use the word “stacked” rather than “stalked,” for if you look at the red or purple dead nettle, its leaves are all stacked up close to the top of the stem, turning green to red from the lowermost to the topmost, whereas the henbit plant has green parasol-like leaves separated at intervals along its stem. I still don’t know what I saw on July 16, 2010, but I’ll be a little bit wiser this year as I’m on the lookout for something.
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