Pause a Moment Beneath an Oak's Red Leaves

October 26, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  For the second day in a row I have no work.  Squeak is sleeping most of the day; I guess she was out a little this morning, but didn’t venture far from the porch.  The Boy called earlier and said that after paying this month’s bills for student loans he has no money.  I vacuum and try to clear up some of the junk lying on the floor in his old bedroom, which is where I sleep now – detritus from his childhood, mechanisms I have no idea what they are; I stick them in a banana box and hope Moi will sort them out someday.  By the time 1 pm rolls around, I need some air, and decide to take Mway for her walk.  Besides it might rain later.

State of the Path:  I have the old birch branch, which I found in the music room last night.  The top leaves of the maple beside the pool have fallen and lie around the pool or on top of the cover.  Blackberry and black raspberry leaves have all turned various colors, yellow, orange, red, brown. The black walnuts in the old orchard are bare; I see what must be one oak at the far end – it still has leaves, red, of course.  Except for a few leaves that have turned yellow on them, the honeysuckles are still green.  At the back hedgerow I scare up a bunch of birds, smooth gray bodies with conspicuous white tail feathers – these are a kind of bird I see all the time, and I always think of them, rightly or not, as mourning doves.  (Check Audubon – well, these looked nothing like the photo in the book; more like the photo of the white-winged dove on the same page.  I’d say they were white-winged doves, except Audubon limits these to the southernmost tip of Texas.  All the same, I think these were some kind of doves, and, whatever the photo shows, they fit pretty well the prose description for mourning doves: “soft, sandy buff with a long, pointed tail bordered with white”).  The black oak just before the creek seems to be turning a deep red, as deep red as the other tree farther down the creek. Actually, farther down the creek here, I note there are two oaks: a big one right by the creek bank and a smaller one growing beside it on the bug land side of the path.  I stand under the smaller one for awhile, enjoying the deep red leaves that surround me and that stand out so brilliantly against the light.  I walk the plank and take a look at the pin oak; its leaves, whatever they were before (were they red?), now are turning more brown.

State of the Creek:  Mway goes into the water beneath the tree stand – maybe because it’s warm today.  Trickles at the rocks, but I bet to myself that most of the water in the creek hasn’t moved in weeks.  Mway stops to sniff something that made a bubble or something in the water.  I don’t think she has any more idea than I do what it is.

The Fetch:  I definitely don’t enjoy the birch branch as much as the long crooked stick, and I throw it without much enthusiasm into the goldrenrod.  After several tosses I realize Mway has trampled a lot of the goldenrod down on the one side of the beaten-down area in the center, so I toss the stick into the goldenrod on the other side – might as well get her to start trampling this down too.