Mway Knows Something Was Around

August 28, 2010.  Saturday.

Situation:  This morning Moi enlists me in a lot of chores.  First, last night she caught an opossum in the trap cage she set in the garden, and she wants me to carry it down to the creek, where we’ll let it go.  Mway would like to come along, but we leave her in the house.  I’m struck by the pink W.C. Fields snout of the opossum; it’s probably its natural color, but it looks like it could be stained from tomatoes or bloodied from poking through the cage.  It takes us a little while to figure out how to open up the cage to let it out.  Next, Moi wants me to hold the ladder so she can paint the frame of my bedroom window which she can’t get at from inside because of an air conditioner.  Moi is very skittish about ladders: “Why’d the ladder just move?”  “Don’t worry. I just let go for a minute to scratch my face.”  As I’m moving the ladder: “Watch out, you just stepped in dog shit.”  Going into the house to get a cigarette: “You just walked into the house with dog shit on your boots?”  It’s a sunny, bustling Saturday morning:  a lawn tractor or two in the distance; the coo of mourning doves; a McNeighbor shouting at his McChild; the bucking of chickens as they come over to see if we’re dribbling feed; a woman’s voice over a loudspeaker at the tractor pull on O__ C_____ road.  When we’re done, I decide to whack down some of the weeds around the garden, and then, since I already have my walking clothes on, to take Mway for her walk.  It’s about 12:30.  Moi and I both work at separate places tonight. I’m happy to get the walk out of the way.  I select a new fetching stick that I spotted under the lilac bush the other day; it’s long and will double as a walking stick like the old “pro-quality” stick used to do.

State of the Path:  I decide to take the side path along the old orchard, which I haven’t gone on for a while.  Red jack-in-the-pulpit seed cobs brighten their little patch of ground.  I step through the monkey vine portal.  Most of the virgin’s bower is already gone.  I again see a bumblebee disappear inside a touch-me-not.  As we approach the creek, I wonder if we’ll run into the opossum.  Black berries still dangle from the “chokeberry” bushes; their leaves are turning red and shriveling.  Under the deer stand, Mway starts sniffing the ground; she knows there was some kind of creature here.  The bull thistle is all fuzz.  I can’t find any “creeping bush clover” today.  Ironweed and boneset still bloom in bug land.  Heal-all still comes up along the path.  On the other side of the ridge, I’m especially careful how I walk; my foot is getting better, but it’s still sensitive.  Cabbage butterflies, a black swallowtail, flutter ahead of me.  Grasshoppers leap from one goldenrod stem to the next.

State of the Creek:  Near the big locust trees, on the opposite bank of the creek, is a small oak tree, whose bottom of its trunk lies exposed above a cavity in the bank.  Around it is a big clump of sod supported by the trees roots.  I reflect that this is also a good place for something or other to live around.  A monkey vine winds around the trunk of the tree.  Today all of the vinyl siding is sticking out of the water.

The Fetch:  Mway has to get used to the new stick, especially since it has branch notches.  She bites into it especially hard, to get her saliva all over and her teeth marks into it.   A good number of fetches today – Mway likes the stick, as she would any stick.