It Must Be Amur Honeysuckle

September 21, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  Work in the afternoon, and get home about 3:30.  Mway greets me in the driveway when I get out of the car.  I go inside to change into my walking clothes but before I step outside I read through a website page I printed off the computer this spring because I have the inkling that the redberried bushes I’ve been seeing near the old dump are some kind of honeysuckle.  Indeed what I read on the printout is that the Morrow’s honeysuckle berries ripen between late June and early August, while those of the Amur honeysuckle ripen from September to November.  When I finally step outside, grabbing the birch branch off the bench, the chickens come running up to me, and I expect to see Mway come running behind them somewhere.  But she’s nowhere to be seen.  I call out to her, and soon start to suspect that she’s getting into trouble somewhere.  I walk back into the house to see if she happens to be in there.  Moi’s vacuuming in the music room, but I don’t see Mway anywhere, so I go outside again.  I call out once more, and this time I even begin to suspect that maybe she’s just ignoring me.  I go back into the house to ask Moi if she knows where Mwayla is.  Moi turns off the vacuum, and pretty soon Mway creeps into the kitchen – she was just hiding from the vacuum cleaner. 

State of the Path:  My cold has pretty much left my nose and settled deep into my chest, so it feels good to be out in the air.  I head back on the side path to check on the bushes, reminding myself that all these bushes must have had honeysuckle flowers on them this past spring, so they must be Arum honeysuckles.  I notice that some of the bushes don’t have berries; these I reason must be the Morrow’s.  I have nothing to go on, except the vague memory of flowers, and the shape of the leaves.  The printout tells me that the Amur leaves are “ovate, about 2 -3 inches long with a long tapering tip.”  This is exactly what I see.  That problem solved, I stare through the bushes for a while at a TV that the Boy had dragged out here when he and his friends were playing paintball, its insides spilling out onto the ground.   Then I start looking to see if the jack-in-the-pulpit fruit has dissolved into the ground; it takes me a while, but I find the fruit still lying on top of the ground, shriveling up.  When I enter back on the main path, I see Mway standing up aways in the middle of the path, just staring at me; since usually she’s always moving around, I wonder if she doesn’t want to go down to the creek for some reason.  After I stare back at her for awhile, I turn right and start heading down to the creek; pretty soon, Mway follows, and eventually I lose track of her as I walk along looking at the same wildflowers I’ve been looking at the past week or so.  I head over to the crest of the skating pond to check on the strange green-sepaled plant, careful on the way to avoid the sticky seeds of the tall meadow rue.   Again I step into the dry creek bed to look at the plant closely, noting its heavily serrated leaves-of-three and touching what seems to be its flowers, all of which are still unopened and some of which are turning brownish-green.  I still can’t tell if these are petals that haven’t opened or if they’re stamen and pistil.  I leaf pretty carefully through both the green-flower and yellow-flower sections of the Audubon, thinking there must be a photo in there somewhere of this plant, but again I find nothing.

State of the Creek:  The puddle at the log jam is about the size of a small cereal bowl.  The little puddle at the big oak is gone.  Only two other puddles remain, those at the narrows.

The Fetch:  Mway greets me at the clearing.  I stand in the short goldenrod and start throwing the stick within the clearing, where I’ve been throwing it to help beat down the weeds, but then I remember that yesterday the Boy was throwing the stick as far as he could, and I think, what the hell, I’m going to start doing the same.  So I alternate throws between the goldenrod in front of the sumacs and the goldenrod along the path beyond the clearing, so that Mway really has to dig her way through the weeds to find the stick.   On one of the last fetches, as Mway’s barking and spinning around at my feet, I catch sight of a grasshopper, clinging desperately to a goldenrod leaf close to the ground, managing to weather the storm of motion around it and not get stepped on.