Wonder How I Walked Across It Yesterday

October 14, 2010.  Thursday.

Situation:  Although Moi played with him for a little bit today with a laser light, the new cat, Woody, runs away when he sees Mway or Squeak and spends most of his day in hiding.  I work a little bit and am now home, waiting for Moi and Mway to wake up from their naps.  It’s raining, so I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do.  I decide to go and lie down myself, but after a couple minutes I hear Moi and Mway getting up.  I read for a little while longer (skimming through Kaufmann’s portable Nietzsche for passages on the eternal return), then get up.  It’s about 3:30.  It’s cold enough that Moi has the wood pellet stove going, so I decide to put on my snow suit over my walking clothes.  I find the birch branch in the music room, which is not where Mway put it when I took her for a walk yesterday.

State of the Path:  It’s not raining that hard, but I decide to take the shortest way down to the creek, which is on the path I cleared two days ago, below the summer house.  As soon as I feel the water soaking my socks, I wonder to myself why I’m taking this walk. Much of the goldenrod now has brown dried leaves along the stems.  Mway turns to go up to the clearing, and I lose sight of her as I continue on toward the creek.  As I approach the break in the ridge, briars catch against my snow suit.  The path along the ridge is soggy.  I brush my way through the area of the “chokeberries” and head to the feed channel.  When I step on the plank it wobbles, and I wonder to myself how I walked across this yesterday.  My walking stick touches solid earth when I stand at the end of the plank, but I realize that if I step forward the stick will no longer reach the ground.  Finally I turn sideways and sidle along the plank without lifting my feet.  Mway, who’s caught up to me, hops over the ditch behind me. 

State of the Creek:  My first view of the creek is from the crest of the skating pond.  Seems to me some of the oaks are getting redder.  I don’t bother making the circuit around the crest, but head back the same way I came, going over the plank in similar fashion as I did before, although a multiflora briar grabs my snow suit as I’m crossing, and I whack at it with my stick when I reach solid ground.  I step over the swale and walk along the creek as far as the big locust trees.  The creek doesn’t seem much higher than it was yesterday; I can only see it flowing at the rock cascades.  I hear the rain dropping through the trees, and I stand and watch the rain drops make random ripples in the pools, impressed by one drop that lands in the middle of a pool and sends a ripple the entire width of the creek.

The Fetch:  Mway and I head up to the clearing the same way we came down.  I stand in the middle of the wedge of goldenrod, which I note is getting pretty well trampled down, and throw the stick in various directions.  One time I throw it toward the end of the clearing and it lands between some fleabane and a honeysuckle, and I think Mway won’t be able to find it, but she manages to extract it from the weeds okay.  When I throw it toward the other end of the clearing, I notice that Mway avoids a big area of goldenrod that I’d like her to go through and just follows the track down the middle of the clearing, which is now getting muddy and a bit too well-beaten.  At that end of the clearing, the goldenrod which had fuzzy white spikes yesterday now looks completely brown.