An Ever Earlier Nightfall

September 12, 2010.  Sunday.

Situation:  Work all day (all told from 10 – 6, a solid eight hours) and when I get home, although evening is clearly here, it’s still light out enough to take Mway for a walk.

State of the Path:  When I put on my boots, I have to remove from the crack in the instep of the one a stem and bunch of leaves I must have picked up in my walk yesterday; I’m really soon going to have to go out and get a new pair of boots.  It rained last night, so I’m expecting to get a little wet today, but also curious to see how much water has been restored to the creek.  Yesterday Mway lay the birch branch athwart the rim of her wading pool, and that’s where I find it.  Walking through the yard, I hear the distant sound of sirens on S_____ Road (on my way back home a man was setting up cones in the road, and I had to take a detour back to the house – Moi doesn’t know what may have happened down there). The goldenrod and other weeds are especially clogging the path today; it does no good to sweep them back with the birch branch; can do nothing more than just push my way through them. I look at the pink spikes of the lady’s thumbs, then bend down more closely to see the thumb marks on every leaf. I can’t believe that I’ve thought of this plant for over twenty years, since Moi once called it such, as Pennsylvania smartweed. The name still wants to stick to it when I look at it, though the name lady’s thumb is so much more appropriate. I’m full of hope, but ultimately disappointed, that the real Pennsylvania smartweed flowers may have elongated a little from the rain. I still find it hard to think of this plant as Pennsylvania smartweed (and I’m not yet, because of the so far insistent round shape of the flower, a hundred percent sure it is). No honey bees today; bugs maybe like gnats hop up from the rain-dappled leaves; still a bumble bee or two in the touch-me-nots. At the pin oaks I walk smack into a bunch of more gloriously orange leaves. Beyond the ridge around bug land, the sound of the cicadas picks up, and above its incessant drone creak the lonesome chirps of some crickets.  

State of the Creek:  Down at the creek I get my answer to what the rain has wrought.  The usual pools are back, the one at the tree stand, the second at the log jam, the third beneath the black walnut, and two more at the narrows, the second of which, though about five feet long, is still a yard or more away from the vinyl siding, which has a streak of water lying on top of it; and I’m sure if I stepped over the feed channel and walked along the crest of the skating pond I’d find that the pool below the swale has swelled to a much greater size than it was yesterday.  Between the pools there’s still no water flowing, but the leaves fallen among the rocks, which were dry and crinkly yesterday, are now damp, and there’s no sound of crunching leaves, just the thud of my boots, as I wind my way through the bushes and trees along the curving banks.

The Fetch:  The overcast sky, the approach of an ever earlier nightfall, the blooming of the last summer flowers, the first falling leaves, gives to the walk a melancholy air, a mood of pensive reflection utterly spoiled, up at the clearing, by Mway’s strident barking and maniacal spinning as, over and over, I cock my arm to toss her all-important stick.