Trip down the Path; Glance at Vinyl Siding; Go in Pool

July 19, 2010.  Monday.

Situation:  I work this afternoon, and after a cold supper that Moi prepares, I decide to mow the lawn.  Sort of like giving a haircut to a marine, but it gives me a chance to see some wildflowers I don’t see too much in the fields.  Aside from the heal-all and clover in the back yard, there’s a lot of buckeye (English plantain) in the side yard and in my father’s lane.  There’s a giant pokeweed in front of the evergreen where Moi has buried the cats, and a giant burdock in front of the cellar door.  After I finish mowing the lawn, I take Mway for her walk, about 7 pm.

State of the Path:  I’m exhausted after mowing the lawn, and trip a lot along the path.  Just down to the creek and back is all I can take.  I think about how it would be good to take the clippers to widen the path a little, making sure to be careful to leave such things as the moth mullein, which has a few flowers on it today.  I take a pee in the shade of the maples, while Mway rummages around Moi’s collapsing wigwam.   It is tempting to eat some of the blackberries, but I am too tired even to eat.

State of the Creek:  There’s about as much water in the creek today as there was yesterday.  Down past the big locusts, just before the narrows before the swale to bug land, there’s a piece of what looks like vinyl siding in the water.  This has been there ever since I started keeping this journal, but I don’t believe I have mentioned it before.  I’ve mentioned the plastic barrel and the car tire, but I don’t know why I’ve never mentioned this – my glance probably falls upon it on every walk

The Fetch:  I’m hoping Mway doesn’t want to fetch the stick much today, but she goes after it more times than I care to count, then even forces me to play “Put it down” about five or six times.  I throw the stick into a triangle of goldenrod, formed by the path that comes up from the strawberry field and the path in the middle of the clearing that Mway has beatened down in fetching the stick.  Back at the house, Mway drops the stick somewhere in the yard.  At the door, since this is the “pro-quality” stick I’ve been using for months now, I ask Mway where the stick is.  She knows exactly what I’m asking her, and with what seems to me great enthusiasm she goes over to where she dropped it, carries it to the door, and redrops it there.  After I let her in the house, I get ready to go into the pool.  I’m too tired to put on my suit, so I just hang up my workshirt soaked with sweat on the line (I’ve already taken my pants and sweat socks off inside).  I turn off the filter and clean out the basket filled with leaves and some bugs, then hang my underpants on the clothesline next to the towel that’s perpetually on the line.  Usually when I get in our above-ground pool (which is about every day), I swim twenty laps around the circumference, doing ten laps of breast stroke, five of back stroke with inverted frog leg and hand strokes, two of side stroke on one side, two of side stroke on the other side, then a final lap of breast stroke or a mock head-above-the-water Australian crawl (the pool’s too small to do a proper Australian crawl).  Today, though, I’m too tired to do all this, and I figure I can skip all the laps.   I still have to scoop up from the water whatever willow or maple leaves have fallen in the water and whatever gnats, flies, bees, or beetles have died in it.  Usually when I’m doing this, and cleaning out the basket, the chickens are milling around ready to snap up any dead bugs I’ve dumped on the ground.  Tonight, though, they’ve already retired to their coop; only the gray hen, which Moi has noted lays the biggest eggs, is still pecking around, and eventually she wanders toward the pool.  The other day I mentioned to Moi how efficient I thought it was that the chickens eat the dead bugs from the pool.  “Yeah,” she said fatalistically, “Bugs killed by Bacquacil, and we eat the eggs that the chickens lay.”  I hadn’t thought about that.