On My Own

September 20, 2010.  Monday.

Situation:  Work in the afternoon, get home about 3.  Moi’s in the back yard working on a window.  Mway greets me when I get out of the car.  While I’m upstairs changing into my walking clothes, the Boy, on his way back to NYC after visiting with Jennifer, pulls into the driveway.  Even as I’m putting on my boots, I can hear Mway barking outside, and I know that the Boy has started throwing the stick for Mway.  When I get outside, I find the birch branch and my walking stick and walk over to say hello to the Boy.  “I’m already throwing the stick for Mway,” he grins, “as you can see.”  “Well, Mway can still go for a walk,” Moi says, and she heads indoors with one of her windows.  Mway begins prancing around the yard with the stick in her mouth.  The stick has a limb fragment which juts up beside her nose. The Boy says he’s going to go inside to look at the new refrigerator.  “Yes,” I tell him, “it’s nice to have a refrigerator with a light that comes on when you open the door, and you can see the food.”  I tell Mway to come on.  She follows me as far as the apple tree, then continues in a circle around the yard with the stick in her mouth.  “Okay,” I say to myself, “I can still go for a walk; it doesn’t have to be with you,” thinking also that perhaps in a little while she’ll start to follow.

State of the Path:  A new line of goldenrod along the path is already starting to sag into the path a little.  I walk with both sticks down as far as the wigwams, when I realize that Mway is probably not going to come, so I double back and take the side path, where I haven’t walked in a while.  Across the floor of the old orchard, the giant Virginia creeper – or whatever it really is – is turning red.  Once again I face the bushes with red berries near the old dump, not knowing what they are, and I begin to wonder if they might be honeysuckles which my poor memory no longer recognizes.  As I wind back down to the main path, I look across the goldenrod to the line of bright berried sumacs and take note that they have lost much of their leaves and what remains has turned red.  Below the wigwams, I see, among the touch-me-nots, the strong crop of New York or New England asters, and I realize that these flowers are burgeoning wherever they’ve come up, at the swale, in the feed channel, and on the other side of the break in the ridge.  I stop to pick a touch-me-not seed pod to touch.  Along the creek, I look at the plant I’ve tentatively deemed tickseed sunflower – the other day Moi questioned my calling it such, because the 2-pronged tickseeds that get on your clothing in the fall seem to be more prevalent than this one plant.  I then go over to the crest of the skating pond to look at the other yellow wildflower, with the prominent green sepals, and which I now realize, from the difference in leaves, is not the same plant as whatever the other plant is.  I walk into the dry creek bed, to take a close look:  the paint-brush-like flowers still have not bloomed, and I wonder what’s up with this plant.  While I’m there I start to feel real itchy, and I realize I have some green sticky seeds on my shirt, and I wonder if they’re from the tall meadow rue I just brushed past.  Along the ridge along bug land, I look again at the new fleabane, which I only saw dimly yesterday evening, although it seemed more impressive then.

State of the Creek:  Puddle still at the log jam, two puddles at the narrows, but the puddle going back to the swale has disappeared, and amazingly enough there’s a puddle at the base of a big oak, another tree with exposed roots, which I don’t see until I go down to look at the green-sepaled plant.

The Fetch:  As I walk through the clearing, the grasshoppers hop up and fly out ahead of me, their temporarily opened wings carrying them for a foot or two to a new resting place out of reach of my boots.  With both sticks, I walk through the path along the sumacs, heavily walled in by briars, and when I reach the yard, there sits Mway, gnawing on the stick she fetched with the Boy.