Decide to Go Without Socks

August 12, 2010.  Thursday.

Situation:  I don’t work tonight, but I do work for a short while in the afternoon.  When I come home, Moi is out working, and when she comes home, I decide to take Mway for her walk, about 4:45.  It’s no longer raining – it’s been raining lightly on and off all day.  I know I’ll get wet on the walk, so I decide to wear my boots just over my bare feet, rather than wear socks – prefer to feel the wet directly on my feet, rather than have my feet enclosed in dirty, soggy socks.  Whatever repair Moi did to my boots this spring has become undone, and I can see the pink flesh of my feet through the cracks in the black boots.

State of the Path:  The ground is again brown, and soon I’m getting wet from the weeds bent down across the path by the rain.  Just down to the creek and back.  Near the wigwams, I hear a slight roar, and I think for a moment that it might be water gushing down the creek, but then I see wind blowing through the locusts.  Under the pin oaks, a mosquito whines in my ear, perhaps the first one I’ve heard this year.  I don’t expect to see any new wildflowers out on this gray cloudy day, and I’m surprised when I see down by the creek a few purple flowers sticking out from a bunch of jewelweed, a five-petaled flower and heart-shaped leaves with two little tear-shaped leaves above each one.  A quick perusal of Audubon comes up with nothing like what I see.  The wind blows down yellow locust leaves.  By the time I’m walking up from the ridge around bug land, my pants and shirt-sleaves are wet.  Walking through the poison ivy, I worry a little that my skin might be exposed to it through the cracks in the boots.

State of the Creek:  I stop to look at the creek beneath the tree stand.  I see more water in the pool beneath the big maple, but when Mway ventures down into the creek bed just above it I can hear dry rocks clacking.  There are now pools everywhere pools form, but the creek is still disconnected.  The pool near the vinyl siding is much bigger, although the siding doesn’t seem much closer to the edge of the water (the pool has grown in the opposite direction).  There’s a streak of water on the vinyl.

The Fetch:  Mway gives me more fetches than she did yesterday.  After a few bouts of “Put it down,” Mway looks like she wants to head on down the path, and I gesture, “Go.  Good enough.”