September 10, 2010. Friday.
Situation: This morning Moi is pulling some furniture out of storage which she and Ezra are going to take in his truck to the Boy’s apartment on Monday: a mattress and box spring out of the corn crib, which she’s going to have to inspect for mice nests, and a dresser out of the cellar, which she has to wipe the dust, mildew, and mold off of. In the dresser, she finds one drawer full of videotapes and other stuff the Boy accumulated as a teenager, which she brings up to the kitchen to sort through. One thing she finds in there is a Playboy issue from 1999. “How old would the Boy have been in 1999?” Moi asks me. “Well, let’s see,” I say, “He was born in 1986, so that would make him thirteen.” “Does that seem like the right age for that sort of thing to start?” Moi asks again. “Yep,” I say, “That’s about the right age.” Another thing she finds in there is a flip-card packet for identifying various animal tracks, which she hands to me, saying I could probably use this on my walks. I certainly could have used it this past winter, and maybe I’ll have an opportunity to use it this fall, so I put it on the window sill in my office next to the Audubon wildflower book. No work tonight, but I work during the afternoon, and I get back for my walk with Mway about 4:00.
State of the Path: Dark rain clouds suspended in blues skies again make a mockery of the bone-white ground. On the side path, I poke one of the giant anthills, and some tiny ants do indeed spring up. The jack-in-the-pulpit seeds, still bright red as ever, now lie upon the ground, seem about ready to disperse into the soil. Mway and I make a short visit to the dump mound, where I shake my head because I remember I still don’t know what the red-berried shrubs surrounding it are. But my main focus today is to try to clear up my confusion about the smartweed-type plants I’ve been mulling over the last couple days, and with Audubon in hand, I first look at a cluster of what I’ve been calling Pennsylvania smartweed not far from the walled garden. I’ve reread the entry on that plant as well as the one on lady’s thumb, and keeping a bookmark in the pages of the photos and a thumb in the pages of description, I soon realize that what I’m looking at here is not Pennsylvania smartweed, but lady’s thumb. I’ve already seen, of course, the “oblong…spikes of small, pink…flowers,” and I confirm that there are “pinkish stems.” But the clincher is that I discern on the “broadly lanceolate, punctate” leaves “a dark green triangle in the middle”; I wouldn’t call it a triangle exactly, more like a dark smudge, or, well, a thumbprint. After going on the side path, I then stop just at the start of bug land to look at the plants that I told Moi the other day were not Pennsylvania smartweed. I still don’t like the fact that the flowers are still more cylindrical than elongated, though I suppose they could be, as Audubon puts it, “spike-like” -- I conjecture that maybe they just haven’t yet grown long, perhaps because of the dry weather or perhaps because of their youth. I confirm that the stalks are “sticky-haired.” But what makes me think this is Pennsylvania smartweed, and that I was wrong and Moi was right, is that I see that the “leaf bases form a distinctive cylindrical sheath where the petiole joins the stem,” or as I would put it, the indentation at the top of the arrowhead-like leaves seems to wrap around the stem. I move on, and I see that this plant is growing a lot amidst the touch-me-nots, and I even see some of the same plants with white flowers, and I think this might be, what Audubon mentions as, a “closely related species, Pale Smartweed,” although the stems here are also bristly instead of “usually smooth.” (Audubon says there are over 30 species of smartweed, so maybe I’m looking at some of the smartweeds they don’t describe in the book.) Down at the creek, I look again there too at the plants I no longer believe are Pennsylvania smartweed, and here also I find the tell-tale thumbprints of lady’s thumb.
State of the Creek: As I walk along the creek, the main sound I hear is that of dry crinkled leaves crunching under my boots. At the narrows, I stop to gaze past the little puddle and admire the long cavity in the creek bank under the big locusts, where strong girders and a cozy thatchwork of roots are exposed.
The Fetch: Mway’s bark seems even louder and her body movements even more tense than usual.
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