Try to Identify Donkey-Tail Grass

July 5, 2010.  Monday.

Situation:  I don’t wake up quite as early this morning, about 8:30.  The food I nuked for Squeak still sits in her dish, so I nuke it again and place it back on top of the refrigerator.  Squeak turns her nose up at it.   Today is another day I have no work to do – I won’t even have to mow the lawn, not even spot mow, it’s been so dry.

State of the Path:  But as soon as I step out of the house I hear one of the McNeighbors mowing his lawn.  I look around and see Schmidt (one of the few neighbor’s names I know) spinning around on his McTractor and running over his McQuickGrass.  The air is not as cool as it was yesterday – the weatherman has called for 100 degree temperatures this week, and I can feel it coming already.  I found my old walking stick lying on our slate walk, so I’ve brought two sticks along with me, like days of old – when I come across a cobweb on the path, I have a choice of sticks with which to knock it down.  On the side path, I look for ripened black raspberries.  I don’t see any that I would want to eat – maybe a few shrunken dried ones.  I don’t think the raspberries have done as well as they seemed they were going to do.  Perhaps they’ve been thwarted by the dry weather.  As I look through the bending briars and beyond, I mostly see red honeysuckle berries – it could be also that these honeysuckles are outcompeting the raspberries.  Along the back hedgerow, blackberry briars soar every which way, ten feet into the air.  The jack-in-the-pulpits are turning brown; their green corncob-like fruit stand ready to drop.  I still have to wade through goldenrod, and I also have to wade through the grasses at the seeps in bug land.  But the bottoms of the stalks of these grasses are turning brown.  Along the creek, I look again at a type of grass that seems so prevalent down here, almost displacing the jewelweed; some places the grass grows in patches, and its leaves, which look like pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey tails that kids might have attached to the stems, look so vibrant and hearty.  I’ve been unable to find this plant in Audubon, so I’ve googled “wild grasses of Pennsylvania” this morning, in the hope of finding a picture of the plant.  The web seems about as taciturn on grasses as Audubon: most sites are about ornamental lawn grasses.  I do find one site that is selling wild grasses for lawns and garden and which contains two pages of pictures and samples.  They list some things that look like stuff I’ve seen on my walks: bristly sedge – with long burs; crested oval sedge – with short burs; sallow sedge – with brown burs; great spike rush – is this the grass I see down at bug land?; Pennsylvania sedge; nodding fescue.  Unfortunately the site is simply trying to sell me this stuff; the information about the plants is scant, the pictures small.

State of the Creek:  As I walk along the creek, I hold my breath to see which pools have not yet disappeared.  There’s still a puddle at the log jam, one or two at the bend beyond the big trees, and a sizable pool below the swale from bug land, which is where Mway goes to take a sip of water.  Most of the creek is just a long row of rocks, parts of it hemmed by weeds, other parts by mud and exposed tree roots where the frogs hide, I suppose, from the dry weather.

The Fetch:   Up at the clearing, Mway fetches the stick one time after another, with barely a chance for me to stand up before I have to bend over and toss it again, beating a path down to dry brown grass from one end of the clearing to the middle, which we’ve both trampled down to dry brown grass with our feet and paws.  I took a swim last night, but I don’t feel that my muscles are sore.  After a while I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing; I’m bending over and tossing on automatic pilot, and I find myself, instead of noticing what’s happening, composing sentences in my mind for tentative use in this journal, a habit I reproach myself slightly for.