Check Out Plants, Don't Know What They Are

November 22, 2010.  Monday.

Situation:  Though I took my DUI class a week ago, this morning I receive in the mail a “Petition To Revoke ARD” from the court, along with a notice of a hearing scheduled on the matter for December 28.   Frantically I call the probation officer listed on the notice, managing to actually reach her on the first call.  The situation, as she already knows, is that I took the class during the one-month grace period after my probation had expired.  As I hoped, the probation officer reassures me that I may ignore the petition. By the time I get off the phone, Moi is getting ready to go out on some errands.   She says she didn’t take Mway out for a full walk, only fetched stick with her in the back yard.   So far I have no work that has come in for me to do today, so I’ll probably take Mway for a walk sometime soon.  I’ve looked at the picture of the plant Moi saw in the creek yesterday – of course, I have no idea what it is.  Out my window, the air looks cold and misty, the sky gray, the kind of day I like -- November may be my favorite month of the year.  Moi has just come back from her errands, with a report about some outrageous consequences due to American firms outsourcing labor: she had wanted to buy some orange fabric to add to her homemade hunting outfit, but, unlike six or seven years ago, she wasn’t able to find any.  She learned from one merchant that it’s being hoarded by sewing interests overseas.  Well, time for that walk.

State of the Path:  I pick up some sticks that Mway has dropped in the music room, their bark shedding on the rug.  Outside I can’t find the long stick with the gash I’ve been using, so I select one from the music room; it’s not quite as lengthy and weighty, but it will do.  Out on the path, note the colors of November:  the yellowing leaves of the honeysuckles, purple canes of the black raspberries, red ones of the blackberries, the latter’s reddish leaves, low green grass in the path, green garlic grass and gill-of-the-ground, brown stalks of goldenrod bearing white fuzz, the red candles of the sumacs, the gray bare branches of most of the trees and shrubs, the brown leaves still clinging to some of the oaks, the light brown tall grass of bugland, black stalks of ironweed leaning over, the occasional red berries on the bare multiflora briars, the green cedars and pines.  At the crest of the skating pond, I veer from the path to look over the edge of the pond; it looks like there’s water lying in the brown grass but I can’t tell how much.  In the “chokeberries,” I see for a second a bird that seems to have the head of a black-capped chickadee, but its wings and belly look striped black and brown.  I think maybe this is how the female of the species looks, but Audubon doesn’t confirm this. Whatever it is, it makes a squeaking noise.  The leaves of the Russian olives have stayed green for a long time, but they are now shedding quickly.

State of the Creek:  I stop to look at the plant Moi saw in the water; it’s growing in a shallow cascade right in front of where the big log from the former log jam was flung up onto another log on the creek bank.  I can get fairly close to it by walking through the multiflora briars that I see are bent from Moi walking through them yesterday.  The plant has leaves with three lobes, kind of like a maple leaf.  Just downsteam from it, there’s a dirt bar forming in the creek, so the water’s being swept by it into one narrow channel running along the opposite bank.  Down from this, where the creek widens again and forms a pool (one of those that are last to disappear in the dry summer), I see a plant I’ve seen before, one with spiky leaves that grows entirely underwater; I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, and I’m surprised Moi didn’t see it.

The Fetch:  When I get up to the clearing, before tossing the stick I decide to go check on Moi’s cedars, wading through goldenrod and tripping over sumac saplings to get to them.  Mway follows me, happy to have some new ground to sniff around. The one cedar’s narrow and the other one seems bushier.  I realize now, after looking through the Audubon back here in the office, that I have to look at them again more closely.  On the bushier tree I find Moi’s “turd-like” objects; they almost look like mutant cones; Moi thinks they may be the cocoons of some insect, but to me they look natural to the tree – I don’t know.  Audubon only lists a couple trees of the cypress family: the one that looks like it would be most common around here is the eastern redcedar, or red juniper.  The cones are described as “berrylike…dark blue with a bloom.”  I know I’ve seen these blue cones on trees in past years, but I haven’t thought to look for them this year.  Audubon then says that the “pollen cones [are] on separate trees”; I wonder if the turd-like things could be pollen cones.  Mway and I go back to the clearing, and I start tossing the stick.  I realize I can throw the stick as far as Moi by just pitching it underhand, whereas she has to wind up with a full-bodied backhand.  After a couple fetches, Mway comes up the path, empty-mouthed, sheepishly smiling with tongue hanging, and I have to march down into the goldenrod to help her find the stick.  As soon as I see it she spots it too, but I figure now she’s screwed up and I only toss it one more time.  Back in the house, Moi asks me if I looked at the plant in the creek, and I tell her I did.  Then she asks me, “Did you see anything else?” giving me this devilish look.  I shake my head.  “Well, next time you take a walk look to see where some of the creek bank’s missing,” she says, “I found a spot that was giving way, and I stomped on it twice.  It fell through.  I almost sprained my wrist.”