Get Caught Up in Vines, Dead Branches

October 5, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  Work this afternoon; when I get home it’s about 2:45, Moi and Mway are taking a nap.  I might as well go lie down myself, read, perhaps nod off for awhile, until they get up.  I read a selection from Ryle’s The Concept of Mind in one of the Boy’s college textbooks, and then I must doze off, except it seems to me I’m just lying there with my eyes closed, repeating “I am now dozing off into a certain state of mind.”  Suddenly I hear Mway barking outside, then I hear Moi shouting, “Mwayla.  What are you doing?  Bad dog.  Bad dog.”

State of the Path:   I retrieve the birch branch from the music room, where I had seen it earlier.  To my question what Mway was doing, Moi says, “Oh, she was trying to chase the black hen with her new peeps.  Not that I need more chickens.  But still.  When I was coming home from Ollie’s this morning, I saw one of those red hawks.  The chickens were all up on the porch, squawking.”  Moi follows me outside and goes over to the coop to adjust a tarp or something, saying she might need my help.   Mway ventures over to the door of the coop, and Moi yells at her to get away from there.  Moi finally tells me she doesn’t need my help just now, so I call Mway to follow me.  In the walled garden, the trash pile that Moi had been burning all day is still smoldering.  It’s a cloudy day, but the weeds are not too wet.  When Mway turns to go down the side path, I decide to go that way too.  Though the black walnuts have been shedding leaves (which I’m now walking on), their branches are not yet completely bare.  But with less leaves, the monkey vines seem more visible.  I get tangled for a second or two in the one vine at the monkey vine portal.  The part of the side path that goes through the goldenrod could use a clipping, I think to myself, as I brush away the weeds bent over in the pathway.  Down at bug land, two lonely touch-me-not flowers continue to hang on to some withered stems, but I don’t find any seed pods to touch.  Just beyond, about three ironweed flowers still poke up just before the pin oaks.  The highest grass in bug land is now brown, the shorter grass retains its greenness, and I think to myself that I don’t know how long it’s been this way.  Coming up through the strawberry patch, I hear a bird going “Too-wheet, too-wheet, too-wheet, too-wheet.”  I hear this bird all the time, I think, and I should certainly know what it is by now.

State of the Creek:  Mway goes into the water at the tree stand, but she doesn’t wade very far into it and comes out the same place she went in.  I hear the water trickling over the rocks.  I wonder how long the grasses swept over by the water will remain green.  Though the feed channel’s in the same condition it was in yesterday, I decide to step over it anyway.  I brush the asters away so I can see the footholds, and I manage to get across without clutching the honeysuckle bush to help pull me out of the ditch.  The path on the crest of the skating pond is choked with weeds, so I decide not to make the circuit, but head straight for the creek.  I get caught up in some dead branches under an oak tree but finally I reach the bank where I can see the car tire.  The water, though shallow, fills the enire bed here, rippling over the rocks.

The Fetch:  I begin tossing the stick just within the clearing, but when I see Mway usually just follows the path she’s already beaten down, I start throwing it into the taller goldenrod down the path toward the strawberry patch. On one toss, she nearly plows straight through the “chokeberry” bush at one end of the clearing.  I notice she can’t quite tell where the stick is going until she hears it plop into the weeds.  I hear the goldenrod whipping against her body.  We play “Put it down” more times than I care to count.  Finally, she comes slogging up the path, fumbling with the birch branch in her mouth.  I yell “put it down,” but Mway keeps fumbling with the stick, and so I say “good enough.”