Sunlight Falls Short at Hedgerow

November 8, 2010.  Monday.

Situation:  I work a short while this afternoon, at the job I usually do at night and on Sundays.  As I’m coming home between 3:30 and 4:00, I see the sun is low in the sky, and I put off doing a couple of errands, so I can get home before it’s too dark.  I ask the Boy if he wants to go along for my walk with Mway, but he’s in the middle of making beer with Moi and says he wants to take a nap afterwards.

State of the Path:  I find a new stick on the bench; it seems like a good length, so I take that rather than bother looking for the birch branch.  The entire backyard is in shadow.  I don’t see any sun until I reach the path at Moi’s garden pond, where some of the all-winged insects are dancing in the beams.  Mway turns left on the side path.  I see a monkey vine that looks like a giant python coiled under a honeysuckle that encircles a tree.  The ball of sun blazes blindingly through the old orchard, but its expanse of light mainly falls short at the back hedgerow.  Near the cedar, I come across a spindly bare plant bearing long red seed pods – it reminds me of something that I was looking up sometime ago, which had such pods as a distinguishing characteristic, but I don’t remember what that was anymore.  In bug land, I note the bare “chokeberries,” with their reddish branches, which reminds me that for so long I called these plants red willows, which, with the bare branches showing, seems like an appropriate name.  Thinking about willows, I look back up the field and see that the willow in our back yard still has many of its green leaves.  Along the creek, I check on the little tree that leans across the stream and that I thought might be a willow: most of its leaves are gone, only a few willow-like leaves at the top.  I look for but don’t see the willow that Moi planted: its leaves must be gone.  I walk the plank and circle the crest of the skating pond.  At the pin oak I have to stoop under, there’s also a multiflora branch that jags me nearly every time I walk here.

State of the Creek:  The pools are quiet and still; I only see water moving at the rocks.  Most of the leaves have either sunk to the bottom of the water or have accumulated along the banks, though as I walk along, an oak leaf or two falls from a tree and lands in the middle of the water.

The Fetch:  The new stick is nice to throw, and it has some spring to it apparently, a couple times bouncing so that Mway has to twist around to catch it between her teeth.  On about the fourth or fifth toss, the stick slips from my hand and lands deep in the goldenrod.  When Mway comes back with the stick, she is coughing and snorting from goldenrod fuzz and keeps the stick in her mouth, as if to to say “if you’re going to throw it in there I’m not going to fetch it anymore.”  But I decide to move to level 2 and tell her to “put it down.”  Mways makes a couple more fetches, and I’m careful not to throw it too far into the weeds.  After telling her to “put it down” a couple more times, I get bored and tell her “that’s enough.”