October 24, 2010. Sunday.
Situation: Work all day today. In the car to and back therefrom, Sun Ra, the Futuristic Sounds thereof. Get back the sun hasn’t set down too far, light enough still to take Mway for a walk. Moi has returned my $12.99 size 9’s, traded them for a $19.99 size 10’s.
State of the Path: Can’t find the long crooked stick, or even the birch branch. Halfway across the yard, see a bigger, heavier birch branch, pick that up. The sun sets fast: by the time I changed clothes and am at the pig pen, getting hard to see. Hear weeds slashing against my new boots, thump of two sticks against the ground, leaves crunching underfoot, sound of cicadas. Though I’d taken a pee along the road (in someone’s backyard?), have to stop again when I reach the creek. When I’m marching along again, Mway stops on the path – does she see something? Guess not. Make haste the rest of the way. Boots feel good. Beyond the ridge, scare a gray, white-tailed bird from the Russian olive.
State of the Creek: Winding black and furtive to my left. Looks like a paved cartway. Think to myself I can’t walk on it, this form of matter, so intimate, so foreign.
The Fetch: I toss the big heavy birch branch into the goldenrod. If I’ve thrown it twenty feet, Mway brings it back five feet short of where I’m standing. The next toss, if I’ve thrown it fifteen feet, Mway brings it back ten. She hasn’t complained about it, but the stick’s a little heavy for her. Ten feet’s a manageable distance for her to lug it. Somehow we get turned around: she brings it back and drops it behind me, so it’s natural I toss it next in the opposite direction. This last toss enough for Mway. Back at the house, I praise the new boots. Moi cuts down one of the old ones, see if they’ll work for rubbers But there are cracks even in the toe, so I take them to the garbage can, which I pull down to the end of the lane, for the local trash collector to take to the giant landfill (which I’ve passed to and from work today).
2 comments:
Writing with a pencil sounds so slow and arduous – and it’s much harder to revise what you’ve written, sometimes even hard to read what you’ve written. Even before word processing came along, I preferred writing with a typewriter to writing with a pen or pencil. With the invention of the personal computer, I gladly gave up both of the more primitive technologies, except as a last resort.
No comment today? What have you been doing – writing with your pencil all day?
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