Chop down Pokeweed, Cut back Briars and Goldenrod

September 18, 2010.   Saturday.

Situation:  This morning while in bed I heard the sound of barking.  It was a rougher tone than Mway’s bark, and I think it must have been Sebastian, our black-walnut-loathing McNeighbor’s Irish setter.  Sebastian used to every once in while break free from his master’s McYard and wander over to our property; at least one time he even came on a walk with me and Mway.  But I haven’t seen him in sometime, certainly not this past year.  We finally heard from the Boy.  He reports that he was walking from a subway stop about ten blocks to his apartment and managed to get home just as the skies were breaking open with a torrent of rain.  Last night I bought a nasal decongestant and suffered through my job performance well enough.  Moi, drawing from her doctor’s expertise, tells me I’m not getting enough sunshine to produce vitamin D: she criticizes all the protective covering I wear on my walks.  Of course the long clothes and safari helmet are meant to protect me from Lyme-carrying ticks and skin-piercing briars; I don’t know how I could take a walk without them.   Moi and I both work together tonight.  To get more air and sunshine today I think I’m going to go out and cut down some weeds.  Moi tells me she wants me to chop down the poke berries under the hemlock.  First I have to check my email and put some socks and underwear in the washing machine.  If I go out on the path to cut down some weeds, I guess I’ll bring Mway along, and that will constitute our walk.

State of the Path:  Mway has been waiting for me in the hall, and she’s right at the door when I’m ready to go out.  Outside she runs to the outbuilding, only to be disappointed when I hang behind to chop down the pokeweed under the hemlock.  Soon enough, though, I’m on the path, cutting back the next line of goldenrod and briars that has sagged into the pathway.  My main focus is on the area between the sumacs and wigwams, where the path is particularly clogged.  The sun is mellow.  The spikes of goldenrod look like shards of the sun that have fallen to the earth.  A bird sings out as I bear down with my clippers, whatever kind of bird it is that goes “too-wheet, too-wheet, too-wheet, too-wheet.”  As I walk back down the path to look for the birch branch I had laid down, a piece of newly-chopped briar attaches itself to my pant leg -- why I wear long pants.  I continue on and find that nothing much more than a multiflora stem here and there deperately needs to be cut, except along the crest of the skating pond, where I eventually venture and where I get lazy anyway and let most of the weeds stand.  Below the wigwams, I again touch one of the seed pods of the touch-me-nots, feel its tingle between my fingertips.  Along the creek, I look again at the yellow daisy-like wildflower, realizing how much wrong information about it I had burned into my brain yesterday.  Its pistils are actually about the same color as its petals, and the flowers have at least eight petals.  It looks an awful lot like the photo of tickseed sunflower in the Audubon, although I’m not quite happy with the length of the leaves in the picture.  I’ll have to bring along the Audubon sometime with me soon, and also keep a look out for the “fruits of this plant [that] are the very common, 2-pronged stickers that cling to one’s clothing during autumn walks.”  Along the crest of the skating pond, I forget to look at the wildflower there on the other side of creek, to see if its flowers have opened up yet, so distracted I am plowing through the weeds I’m not bothering to cut down.

State of the Creek:  Leaves are filling up the cracks between the rocks in the dry rock beds, at places almost covering them to the top.  The puddles seem to be content to be just puddles.

The Fetch:  As I push my way through the goldenrod and set foot in the clearing, grasshoppers leap out of the way, fleeing the stems my legs have touched and clinging to any stem ahead that my boots have not yet reached.  I stand away from the area of bare dirt to throw the stick; I guess it’s on top of some goldenrod plants that, because of Mway trampling over them, never got very high.  Because of where I’m standing, I can’t throw the stick very far, but this doesn’t matter much to Mway.  If I only threw it two feet in front of me she’d still lunge after it and feel she accomplished whatever it is everyday she feels she’s accomplishing.  And it doesn’t seem to matter that she just fetched stick with Moi earlier this morning; she goes after the stick more times than I care to count, and she’d go after it more, if I didn’t suddenly just turn around and say “Good enough.”