A Seed Pod to Touch, Several Birds to Call What I May

October 6, 2010.  Wednesday.

Situation:  Work tonight.  Around noon Moi enlists me in helping her to close up the pool.  We scoop out most of the leaves and decide to leave the algae for next spring to worry about.  I find some birds’ nests, including one with broken eggs in it, in the spaces below the joints in the pool wall.  Before we can put the cover on the pool, Moi says we have to let some of the water out, so while the water’s pouring out of the drain and Moi’s hosing algae that looks like seaweed off the ladder, I take Mway for her walk.  It’s about 1:00.

State of the Path:  There’s still lady’s thumb along the path, but it’s disappearing.  Same for Moi’s round-flowered “smartweed.”  More of the goldenrod is fading, and between the two lines of sumacs, whole areas have turned fuzzy white.  The last touch-me-not flowers I think have fallen off, but I do find a big tempting seed pod to touch.  Down by the creek, I see some brown birds flying around a big locust tree.  I catch a good sight of one bird, which, after leafing through Audubon, I’m going to call a black-throated sparrow or a white-crowned sparrow, whether it was one of these birds or not.  Then I see a cardinal.  In a distant tree, I hear some birds making a very scary sound, and I see something fairly big fly away, but I can’t tell what this bird is at all.

State of the Creek:  Flowing gently.  The sun shines yellow down into the pools.  A frog leaps into the water and darts under a root.

The Fetch:  After one toss within the clearing, I make the rest of the tosses into the taller goldenrod and situate myself so that when Mway comes back with the stick and spins around she’ll beat down some medium-tall goldenrod that stands in a wedge in front of the “chokeberry” bush.  Mway fetches the birch branch a good number of times, but we only play “Put it down” once, and that’s fine with me.