Late Summer Flowers in the Near Dark

October 3, 2010.  Sunday.

Situation:  Work all day today, get home about 6: it’s still light out.  But Moi has been working all day today too, and she hasn’t arrived home yet.  As I unlock the door, carrying my boxes of fringe benefits into the house with me, I consider that, since the time Moi took her out this morning, between 8 and 9 and now, Mway has had nothing to do for about 10 hours but wait for one of us to return.  Squeak runs down the steps to meet me, but, as I’m putting my chicken wings in the refrigerator and taking my work jacket off and hanging up my keys, I see no sign of Mway.  When I walk upstairs, Moi’s bedroom door is open.  I peek in as I walk by, and Mway is sitting bolt upright on the bed, staring at me as I walk by.  I leave my own bedroom door open as I put on my walking clothes; Mway ventures over to the doorway, smiling, and bending forward to stretch her leg muscles.

State of the Path:  The chickens have already gone into their coop, and I close the latch on their gate.  The sun, which had been behind some dark clouds, has sunk a little lower into a patch of blue sky, but it is now too low to cast much light into the field of goldenrod: its light only shines brightly on the trees of the back hedgerow and a few of the maples.  As I walk through the dimly lit field, I notice that, while much of the goldenrod still has bright yellow spikes of flowers, more and more of the flowers have turned brownish and gray-green and quite a few have become fuzzy white.  The New York or New England asters and the flowers that I have been calling fleabane (because they look like the fleabane I had identified earlier this year) continue to flare up in bushy swatches of many flowers; but these burgeoning outbreaks of flowers look odd in the dim light, like much ado about nothing.  As I’ve mentioned before, the touch-me-nots, except for a few still hanging on in what must be a bright spot for most of the day in bug land, have lost most of their flowers.  A couple ironweed flowers are still lavender, but most of these plants poke up with brownish petals that look kind of like fuzzy burrs, which every time I brush past by them I needlessly fear will attach themselves to my clothes.

State of the Creek:  The creek continues to be a stream, that is, there’s water the whole length of it, but I only see it moving where there are rocks; the pools of water between the cascades lie motionless like lakes.  (Seems to me there was something else I wanted to say about the creek, but the beer I’ve been drinking at work may have affected my memory; what is more, it’s now dark out while I’m writing this, and I find it difficult to dispel the impression that my whole walk took place in the dark.)  Wait, I do remember now:  The fallen leaves, once lying in the cracks between the rocks or at the bottoms of puddles, now have collected into little floating islands or peninsulas sticking out of nooks and branch debris.

The Fetch:  After my work on Sunday, when I come home all I really want to hear is silence, or at most the rustling of leaves as I walk over them.  That’s why on a Sunday Mway’s barking up at the clearing sounds especially strident to me, and even more so today because her barking reverberates in what must be mucous in my ears, the last remnants of my cold.  On the path along the sumacs back to the house, I spot some white mushrooms.  They look like the basic mushrooms you find in the supermarket, and I’d love to pick them and eat them.  But the only mushrooms that I can identify and that I have picked from my yard and eaten are the puffballs that sometimes come up above the old barn wall and the morels I’ve seen a few years under our outdoor spigot and by the garbage can.