Go Back to Wearing Socks

August 14, 2010.  Saturday.

Situation:  I have to work tonight, and Moi has to work at another job from noon into evening.  She has already taken Mway out to throw stick, but by the time I get around to taking her for a walk it’s 11:30.  I plan for it to be the only walk I take her for today.  Since it’s dry and sunny, I decide to go back to wearing my athletic socks.  All my walking clothes are damp, stinky, and dirty, but after I have them on and am out walking I don’t mind wearing them for what, after all, is a stinky and dirty chore.  Last night I noticed what looked like a poison ivy rash on one of my fingers; I don’t know how I got it on my finger; but today it is gone.

State of the Path:  I look at the lawn and decide I can postpone mowing until next week.  Another branch has fallen down from our dying birch tree.  Out on the path, the weeds are not wet or dewy, so I take the side path along the old orchard, pleased enough with the clipping I did on it the other day.  I note that one of the multiflora bushes that looked dead this winter is still dead, with a few new green branches growing up on one side.  I pull at weeds as I walk along.  More and more goldenrod is flowering, but it’s not in flower as much as I suspect it will be in the coming weeks.  Along the creek, I trip on a root or vine – it’s not the loopy vine, but another one.  I take the side path along the skating pond, and meet up with a particularly ferocious looking briar, which I’m unable to tear apart as I pull it to one side.   Along the ridge, I pull at some grasses and then hear a loud rustle which I think might be an animal, but then I realize it’s just the brown grasses rustling.  Coming up to the strawberry patch, I hear a bird or two scolding at me and Mway in the honeysuckles, then I see in a maple tree that one of the scolding birds is what looks to me like a catbird, and there’s another one on the branch behind it.  After I watch it squawking for a while, I see on another branch at the opposite end of the tree some sort of yellow oriole.  I’m not going to bother to look into Audubon today to see if my identifications are correct or not.

State of the Creek:  At the deer stand, Mway ventures into the creek bed.  For a time she was regularly going into the pool below the big maple, but lately she has been entering the dry creek just a little above that, on the other side of the multiflora bush – I guess she likes a little variety in her life as much as I do.  I note a lot of newly fallen yellow locust leaves, or rather what I realize are probably black walnut leaves, lying on the ground and in the pools of water.

The Fetch:  Mway makes one fetch then starts running past me, and I say “Good.  Good enough.”  But no sooner do I say that than she drops the stick and starts, to my surprise, on a round of fetches that’s more than she’s made with me in some time, probably at least twenty, with plenty of those being part of the “Put it down” game.  She seems to pant and growl especially loudly today, and on one fetch she really shakes the stick as she’s picking it up, jiggling the weeds around her, including a number of Queen’s Anne’s lace that have come up more in abundance here in the clearing.  Back in the yard, after she drops the stick at the back door, she hops into her little wading pool, spinning around in that like she’s still wound up after fetching the stick.