Catch Another Possum, Find a New Stick, Slip in the Feed Channel

September 6, 2010.  Monday.

Situation:  This morning Moi has caught another opossum in the garden, and around 11 she enlists me to carry the cage down to the creek.  At first she worries that this might be the same one we caught before, but when we look more closely this one’s obviously smaller.  We let it go under the pin oaks, and it runs toward a group of big oaks closely growing together at the hedgerow, fringed with dead branches that drape down around them like a tent.  “That looks like a good place for it to live,” Moi says.  Yes, I think, but probably not as nice as the outbuilding or the pig pen.  On the way back, Moi points out some tiny pink wildflowers near the wigwams.  “Look,” she says, “that must be smartweed.”  “No,” I say, “but we do have some smartweed down by the creek.”  These little flowers are in a round cluster, I think, and smartweed grows in spikes, or at least I think that’s right, and I make a mental note to double check.  Since I already have my walking clothes on, I decide I might as well take Mway for her walk.  She’s under the kitchen table, not sure it’s walk time, so I have to call her to come.  On Saturday night we had a little cookout with friends, and Mway bugged everyone until dusk to toss the stick for her.  The lilac stick got busted in the process – or maybe broke in two sometime earlier when I was tossing the stick in the back yard for Mway.  Whatever, I have to find a new stick, and I choose one of the fallen branches from our dying, if not dead, white birch tree.  I’m not sure how good a stick it will be: it’s of a good length, but it has a knob of a smaller branch in the middle of it with a shard of wood sticking out.  I take it anyway, and I bring my walking stick along with me too.

State of the Path:  At the walled garden, I hear the chickens clucking and crowing in the back acre – maybe they’re out rooting around in the dump.  Mway and I go straight down the main path.  Again I worry she might find and disturb the opossum, but she passes by where we let it go without a pause, although farther down she goes into the dry creek bed and starts sniffing around, and I wonder for a moment if the opossum could have wandered down the creek bed this far already.  I double check the smartweed; yes, their little pink flowers grow in spikes, I confirm.  I cross the feed channel, double checking the asters growing in the ditch, and look to see if there are cat tails growing in the skating pond.  There are – even during this drought – and I reflect there must be some kind of moisture in this nonpond for them to be growing there.  On my way back across the feed channel, walking stick notwithstanding, I slip down the side of the ditch, but fortunately I don’t have far to fall before I land on my side, and none of my ankles or wrists are twisted.

State of the Creek:   The water at the log jam looks like mud – or maybe it is mud, I can’t quite tell.  The one pool at the narrows is a white muddy color – probably it has only about a sixteenth of an inch of water above the mud.  The other pool there, now about a yard or more from the vinyl siding, is a rusty color, probably because it sits on top of rocks.  There’s another pool of water below the swale, which you can only see from the crest of the skating pond.  The creek is again on the verge of drying up completely.

The Fetch:  Up at the clearing, Mway takes easily to the birch branch: she simply ignores the knob of the smaller branch in the center when she chomps down on it to pick it up.  When I toss the stick down the track that Mway has beaten bare in the middle of the clearing, dust flies up.  On the who-knows-what-number toss, I think to myself, “Give it up already, dog.”  Eventually she does give it up, but not until after forcing me to play “Put it down” a couple of times.