Brairs Twice Snag My Cap

November 15, 2010.  Monday.

Situation:  Work late morning into afternoon, get home about 4.  But Moi has to take me to Kantz’s to get my car, which I had dropped off early for inspection (I had been using hers for work).  “Look how disappointed Mway looks,” Moi says, as we close the door behind her.  When we get to the garage, I tell Moi to tell Mway I’ll be home soon to take her for a walk.  Ten minutes later I pull up in the lane, just behind Moi.  “All Things Considered” is on the radio.  In the music room, I find two sticks Mway has dropped there over the weekend.  As I put on my boots and a yellow wool cap (instead of my helmet), she paces frantically around the kitchen table.

State of the Path:  I lay the two sticks on the bench because I find the stick I have been using, a longer stick, on the porch.  The chickens have already retired to their coop.  I feel like I can’t see too well in the diminishing light (a cloudy sky too), but I can at least tell that the honeysuckles have gotten a little yellower since I’ve seen them last.  The blackberry canes seem striking in their redness, probably because many of them are now bare.  At the wigwams, a big birch branch, which I’d seen for weeks in the back yard, lies in the middle of the path.  It’s too big for fetching, but still Mway must have carried it down here sometime over the weekend.  At the tree stand, I lean my walking stick and the fetching stick against a honeysuckle (this one’s leaves are even turning brown and black) to take a pee.  Further down the creek, a multiflora briar snags my wool cap.  I have to clamp my hand down on it and pull hard to unsnag it.  A few feet further on, another briar snags it again -- I think about returning to using my helmet on my next walk.  Along the ridge to bug land, I come to the pines growing there.  I see Moi has put a white post beside the sapling that she always admonishes me not to step on.  Moi had mentioned these pines to me yesterday and had asked me if I knew what kind they are.  I probably just considered them cedars; Moi thinks they might be jack pines.  She asked me to try to identify them sometime.  I would have tried to do so today, but I started out in a hurry because of the waning light.

State of the Creek:  Water’s hardly moving; can just make out the shiny film over the surface beneath the locust trees.

The Fetch:  I start right out throwing the stick at least a few feet each time into the goldenrod, tossing it not only around the “chokeberry” and the honeysuckle but also into the weeds around the electric pole, which has a bunch of dead poison ivy vines around it.  Mway hesitates not at all going deep into the weeds to get the stick; I don’t even hear her coughing and snorting today, although a clump of goldenrod fuzz gets wedged in a crack in the stick.  After I don’t know how many tosses, and we might have already gotten to level 2, the stick slips from my hand, slices, and lands especially deep into the goldenrod.  I hear Mway running back and forth in the weeds, the brown stalks crunching, until eventually I hear her teeth clattering against the stick.  Her teeth are still chomping on the stick when she finally comes running back.  If I were to tell her to “put it down” she probably would go for quite a few more fetches, but I tell her “good enough” and turn around to head back to the house.