November 2, 2010. Tuesday.
Situation: No work today because the workplace is closed. Moi has a colonoscopy tomorrow and is a nervous wreck about it; she doesn’t want me involved in anyway, and has asked Ezra to drive her to the hospital. When I asked her this morning if she had started the dietary regimen the doctors require, she barked at me “You and your family! Always fascinated about shit!” When I explained I was just trying to help, she said, “I don’t want your help. Just leave me alone!” She has gone off to vote (“I’ll probably kill every one down there!” “Then I’ll kill everybody at the hospital tomorrow, if they don’t kill me first.” “And don’t go telling anyone about this! I don’t want them to know anything about me!”) I don’t know what to do today, except to tread as softly as I can, and of course eventually take Moi’s dog for a walk. When Moi comes home, she’s in a better mood, and talks to me as if she hadn’t said anything cruel to me earlier. Eventually I go out, get back about 3, seems like as good a time as any to take Mway out.
State of the Path: I can’t find the birch branch, but just when I’ve settled on another stick, I see Mway running toward the path with the birch branch in her mouth. After I tell her to drop it, and she jumps up a few times at me after I pick it up, she leads the way to the walled garden. The maple by the pool has lost all its leaves. The remaining green in the fields is mostly the leaves of the honeysuckles; the Arums in the old orchard even still have some berries. The maples by the wigwams have lost most of their leaves, though a few still cling to the higher branches. The pin oaks (I’m starting to believe all the oaks by the creek are pin oaks; I stare for a long time at some of the leaves on the ground and they seem to all have “deep lobes nearly to midvein”) still hold onto many of their brown leaves. I remember to look for the new wildflower; its flowers are already turning brown. But then I spot a similar flower just a few feet ahead, with a single cluster of bright yellow flowers. Perhaps this is a goldenrod of some type, I don’t know. At the plank, I note a bush I never paid attention to before sticking branches out toward the plank with red berries on them; it’s a multiflora, and also still has some green leaves on it. Some of the all-wing bugs flit about amidst the fuzz shedding from the goldenrod.
State of the Creek: My shadow fords the creekwaters and glides along the bank. Today it doesn’t land on the honeysuckle, but it passes briefly over the trunk of a locust tree. Down at the crest of the skating pond, I’m surprised two of the pin oaks there, including the one I always have to stoop under, have lost all their leaves (unlike the others). They seemed to have dumped all their leaves into the rocky creek bed at the car tire, so many that you can’t see the water there.
The Fetch: My shadow juts out into the goldenrod; Mway runs around the goldenrod which I wish she’d trample down instead. She fetches the stick – I don’t know – fifteen times maybe, then coaxes me to play “Put it down.” I realize for some reason today that this is like level 2 of her fetching, so I start yelling at her to “put it down” after every fetch till we go – I don’t know – another fifteen times, and I get sick of throwing the stick before she tires out.
2 comments:
MM, I have a high tolerance for disorder (or rather, my general laziness outweighs my intolerance), but what’s happening here in my office is more than I can take. If you don’t gather up your pages and put them neatly somewhere, I’ll have to pick up the damn pages myself and I won’t be concerned with what order they’re in. And what’s this you keep writing: “nothing you need to worry your little head about”? This is one of Moi’s pet phrases, something she usually says to me when she’s planning a project around the house and I show some anxiety about it. Are you starting to actually understand some oral speech?
An artist, as she gives shape to reality, naturally creates a little bit of chaos around her, either in the affairs of her life or in the spaces of her household. You have to garner a little forbearance for this. Ready for “I.” And no, I don’t think I understand speech any better than I did before, nothing beyond what I can surmise from the context of a habitual situation, such as the question “where’s the stick?” The phrase you speak of must be something I picked up from my reading. MM.
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