Three Days-In-One: Finally Realize It's Mway Who Stinks

July 13, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  I have no work today, neither for the afternoon nor for the evening.  I don’t even have to mow the lawn.  I’m beginning to feel like a worker who has, if not a weekend, at least a Sunday.  I let Moi do whatever she will with Mway in the morning, reserving my time for the afternoon.  We’re out on the path shortly before 5.

State of the Path:  What weeds are bending into the path today are doing so, not because they’re weighed down by water, but by their own weight and will.  Huge briars arch through the air; stems of goldenrod are bumped by their neighbors into open space.  I take the side path, see the white jack-in-the-pulpit fruit, hear a McNeighbor talking in his McYard.  Find the mullein, but it hasn’t yet flowered.  The red grass is still flattened, but the path through bug land is now visible.  A few flowering jewelweed by the creek, but no seed pods as yet.  A berried honeysuckle branch blocks my way over the feed channel; I tear it off, but don’t quite know where to throw it, lest I unwittingly plant yet another honeysuckle bush.  I toss it under the existing shrub.  Greeted by more black blackberries on the way to the clearing.  I look for one which has lost its luster, having read that they are the sweet ones.  I eat two, which turn out to be rather sour.

State of the Creek:   The puddles have become pools again, as large and as muddy white as they were yesterday.  The one under the tree stand has links to a chain of puddles by where the skunk cabbages grew in the spring.

The Fetch:  Up at the clearing, Mway fetches the “pro-quality” stick more times than I care to count, then coaxes me to play “Put it down” four or five times.  When I turn around to go back to the house, I have to call her to come.  She fumbles with the stick, and rams my legs, trying to pass me.

July 14, 2010.  Wednesday.

Situation:  It’s raining when I wake up about 9; it’s still raining, a gentle rain, when I sit down to enter this at 10:30.  I have to leave for work tonight about a quarter to 4; sometime before then I should take Mway for a walk, perhaps if and when the rain lets up.  After one o’clock, can hear the roosters crowing outside; means the rain has let up.  Mway lying around in the music room, waiting.  We go out shortly before 2.

State of the Path:   Mway sticks her head into the outbuilding; can’t tell what she might have spied.  The hour of sun has pretty much dried the rain off the weeds.  If my hand casually drops on a goldenrod or grass stalk, I pull it up in passing.  Don’t sample any of the blackberries before the maples.  Surmise that the putrid odor must be the dead bracken.  Again, have to guess where the path is through the red grass, but do so pretty successfully.  The plastic barrel, for weeks now, has been visible; the jewelweed around it has died and disappeared.  But along the banks of the creek, it appears the jewelweed might survive the dry weather and sprout seed pods one of these days.  I venture over the feed channel, despite the water in it, slip on the mud, and just manage not to fall.  In front of the ridge around bug land, Mway goes in the weeds after something; can’t tell what it might have been.  Even before the clearing, had seen some flowers on the goldenrod; now see even more, most of it green but some of it already yellow.  Realize, also, there are two different plants I am calling by one name: goldenrod.  One is sprouting tiny flowers, the other getting a big bud on top.  Will have to research this sometime soon.

State of the Creek:  The pools are full, and water lies among the rocks between them, even trickling here and there.  I think, as I walk along the creek, that I am seeing it, if not flowing, at least filled back up with water, until I check on the creek at the crest of the skating pond.  There, just below the pool of water below the swale, the creek bed is dry, with the discarded tire sitting in it.

The Fetch:  I stand over into some goldenrod to throw the stick today.  Don’t bother counting, but it’s not quite as many fetches today.  Play “Put it down” once or twice: but don’t feel like making a big issue out it.  Sweat’s pouring out of my eyes, and I want to get out of the sun.

July 15, 2010.  Thursday.

Situation:  Normally I would work tonight, but my Thursday job has been reduced to every other week for the remainder of the summer.  I have a little job to do this afternoon (along with some errands which I can do in tandem).  After I get home, I rest up a bit, and get ready to take Mway for a walk about 4.  Moi is working tonight, and before she leaves she says, “If you’re looking for something to do tonight, you could pull up the weeds around the red raspberries in the garden.”  I’m not looking for anything to do, but I ask her anyway to show me which weeds she means, so I don’t accidentally pull up any thing that is not a weed.  Out at the garden, she points, “You can pull up all those ox-eyed daisies.”  “That’s fleabane,” I tell her, and spend ten minutes before the walk getting hot and sweaty pulling it up.

State of the Path:  Out at the walled garden, I see Mway by the far wall, then hear her yelp.  I see her back away from something, then charge forward again at something that looks like a ground hog running along the top of the wall.  It scoots into a hole near where the sumacs are growing (the one sumac is still fallen into the burn pile), and that’s that.  Wherever I see them hanging, I pick a blackberry or two to eat, first by the back hedgerow, then before the wigwams, then past the ridge on the way to the clearing; there are enough ripe blackberries to pick a bowl of them, if I were not too lazy and didn’t have to worry about getting seeds between my teeth.  I’ve brought the Audubon with me, so I try to identify more precisely what type of goldenrod we’ve got in the fields.  It’s only starting to flower, so I have some difficulty with this.  I believe I see a specimen that has long leaves like lance-leaved goldenrod, but other specimens that are just getting their flowers have long leaves too, and these are toothed, which could indicate tall goldenrod; some of the goldenrod have bulb-like things part way down their stems, indicating I don’t know what – I believe I’ll have to reserve judgment till the flowers come in more.  Down by the wigwams, I smell the putrid odor again, and I’m too far from the dead bracken that the smell could be emanating from that.  I recognize the smell now as that of a dead mammal, recalling most recently the dead ground hogs that Blue would cure in the sun.  But when I get down to the creek, passing through where the path narrows before the swale from bug land, I catch a whiff of the smell again.  I look down and sniff at my shirt, thinking that I must have gotten something on it that I’m carrying around with me, but I don’t see or smell anything.  Again I catch a whiff of the smell walking along the ridge, and look again at my shirt and at my hands; I then sniff a honeysuckle bush, thinking that might be causing the odor, but no such smell emanates from that.

On the other side of the feed channel, I suddenly come across a new wildflower, something with little white flowers.  I have my Audubon, but I shake my head at the thought of leafing through its pages, probably in vain, in the hot sun, when suddenly the word “meadow rue,” from previous leafings through the pages, pops into my head.  I find two listings of meadow rue in the index, and when I refer to the photo of tall meadow rue, I’m quite amazed and relieved to find that what I’m staring at in the field is pictured so clearly there in the book, right down to the spiky white flowers (I guess these are the “thread-like stamens”) and the little sassafras-like mitten leaves (“roundish, 3-lobed leaflets” – not every leaf, I might argue).  Throughout the walk, I’ve been looking at this other white wildflower, which I’ve been calling, not to my satisfaction, Queen Anne’s lace.  I really think this flower, with its fern-like leaves, is something else, but I’ve looked into the Audubon too much already today.

State of the Creek:  The pools are holding their own, and as I walk along the creek, I see how the water seems to be trying to flow through the rocks between the pools, flickering if you look closely with a trickle here and there, until it suddenly disappears at a high spot in the creek bed.  The water is losing its cloudiness, and turning a clear brown; the rocks are drying and turning white.  I think I’m noting the lack of water striders, when I see one or two in the pools below the big locusts.

The Fetch:   Up in the clearing, I stand in the same goldenrod I did yesterday to toss the stick.  Right by me are some of the not-quite-Queen-Anne’s-lace-like flowers I’ve been talking about, and I think to myself I’d get out the Audubon right then and there if I wasn’t in the middle of throwing the stick for Mway.  Again I smell the putrid odor, and I look down at my shirt and hands, then leaning over to pick up the stick I bend over further to sniff Mway: the smell is coming from her, all this time it’s been Mway who stinks.  Mway coaxes me to play “Put it down” until she decides herself that she’s done with fetching.  Right now she is lying in the hall outside the office, and when I pass by her I can smell the stench of dead animal.