The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names. (E. O. Wilson, as cited by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal, Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson)

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

What If I Lost the Stick?

August 30, 2010.  Monday.
Situation:  I work this afternoon and don’t get home till about 5:20 (I might have been able to finish up earlier but I was tied up in the morning with some financial concerns and with holding the ladder for Moi.)  Moi’s out in the yard, and she’s in a good mood because a batch of honey bees from our chimney have separated from the hive and clumped up on a branch of a tree by the summer house.  When I’m inside putting on my boots, Moi says “The little dog’s been waiting for you all day.”  “I bet,” I say.  “She thinks you could probably throw the stick by yourself,” Moi jokes, “But what if you lost it?  She needs to be there to bring it back to you.”
State of the Path:  I bring along the lilac stick again, still in good shape, even though (as I forgot to mention) a chip flew off it yesterday.  I whiz in the walled garden, and Mway takes two dumps by the trash pile, which still has the fallen sumac tree lying on top of it.  I hesitate for a moment whether to take the side path, but Mway heads down there, so I follow.  The red jack-in-the-pulpit cobs lie just before the monkey vine portal; the virgin’s bower’s all gone.  The multiflora seems to be going through a last ditch growth spurt, and a couple branches snag me around my shirt collar.  The “chokeberry” bushes continue to redden and wither; some of their berries never turned black or purple, but remain a moonish white-gray.   A monarch (or a viceroy) glides right past my ear.  Bumblebees disappear in the touch-me-nots, and down by the creek, a black swallowtail rejects a boneset flower in favor of several touch-me-nots.  It has to beat its wings quickly to keep its proboscis dipped in the flower.   Beyond the swale, Mway passes me by with a little stick in her mouth (what’s she planning on doing with that, I wonder) and heads through the “chokeberries,” so I don’t bother going by the skating pond (which I don’t really want to anyway.)
State of the Creek:  At the tree stand, Mway jumps over the creek; the jewelweed wiggles as she comes up the other side.  Past the big locusts, on the other side of the creek and surrounded by multiflora is a big oak rising above a giant clod of sod that hangs over the pool of water there (the one by the vinyl siding) – another good place for something or other to live, I reflect.
The Fetch:  Up at the clearing, Mway no longer has the little stick in her mouth, and she awaits me to throw the bigger one I brought along.  The sun is beating hard, and I’m hot in my walking clothes; Mway fetches the stick again and again; with each toss I hope it’s her last – what happened to the days when she only fetched the stick once, I wonder.

1 comment:

sisyphus gregor said...

Moi has gone away on a Red Cross mission to help victims of Hurricane Irene. The Boy, having finished his work with the Little League games, has returned to NYC, one day earlier than anticipated because the co-worker who was to cover for him for a day couldn’t make it in. Aaron, one of the Boy’s buddies, who was crashing here for a few days, has gone home to Philly. All around the house and the backyard are dozens of empty beer cans and bottles from the Boy’s parties this weekend. I noticed that the Boy left his thumb cast on the kitchen counter. Jazz and Matt have been without power at their house for a couple days; I guess they’re using a generator that they’re sharing with their neighbors. Yesterday afternoon on my walk I saw a big turtle lying underwater in the creek; I couldn’t see it moving, but air bubbles seemed to be floating around it, so I think it was alive. On the crest of the skating pond, a lot of large white mushrooms (which I wish I could identify) have sprouted. Up at the clearing, I threw a large lilac branch into the goldenrod (hardly the same lilac branch I mention in my blog today). On one toss, the branch fell athwart the tops of the goldenrod, and I watched for about a minute the goldenrod wiggling and tossing back and forth as Mway frantically searched for the branch on the ground. How slightly different 2011 has been from 2010 around here! But 2010 around here, simply because of my arbitrary decision to write a diary at that time, is all you readers (and I’m not addressing this to any one reader in particular) will ever know in any detail. What if Joyce had decided to write about June 15, 1904, instead of June 16?