Ground a Faded White

December 9, 2010.  Thursday.

Situation:  I wake up shortly before 9.  When I step into the hall, Mway slinks out of my office.  I turn on the computer, go to the bathroom to pee, and downstairs I’m surprised to see Moi sitting at her laptop at the kitchen table.  She tells me she didn’t go hunting because it was 15 degrees outside, 7 degrees wind chill.  She’s making minor revisions on her story, and while I roll a cigarette, she talks to me at length about that.  I ask her if she took Mway for a walk.  “No,” she says, “I let her out when it was still dark outside.”  I go into the living room to smoke my cigarette and drink some coffee while my computer’s warming up.  Out the living room window I can see the swing set sitting in the driveway of our McNeighbor’s house – the one that Moi told me had gone up for sheriff’s sale – I’ve been wondering why the swing set is still there.  Mway comes into the living room and buries her snout in my hand.  I pet her head for a while and then, when she starts walking away, I pat her backside and a cloud of dust rises in the air, as thick as a cloud of cigarette smoke.

State of the Path:  Mway is at the door pacing as I suit up.  Outside the ground is a faded white, as if there had been frost, which, had I been out an hour before, I might’ve seen.   Moi’s garden pond is frozen over with thin ice.  The path is a faded white too, crinkly.  My lips are cold.  A lot of the goldenrod is knocked over, probably collapsed from the cold.  At the wigwams there are patches of ice in the path, and, through bug land, I feel like I’m stepping on the crust of a pie.

State of the Creek:  The water’s flowing at the tree stand.  At the former log jam, a shelf of ice hangs along the far bank.  I poke my walking stick in the water, to confirm that the whole stream of water has not yet frozen over.  Moi’s green plants are still in the cascade, but they look withered and battered.  A few brown leaves cling onto some oaks, and I look back and see that there are still some brown leaves on the oaks just before the creek as well.  I hadn’t taken the side path by the old orchard, and I don’t take the one to the crest of the skating pond either – I have to work today, so I’m somewhat in a hurry.  As I walk along the ridge, the sun, reflecting off the ice in the marshy spot between the ridges, catches me blindingly in the eye – exactly as it did yesterday.

The Fetch:  Up at the clearing, for some reason, the frost that must have covered everything this morning is still apparent here, glistening in the sun.  There’s a strip of snow down the center of the clearing.  I do the circle, Mway running, smiling, spinning, barking, but after I come to throwing the stick down the path, on her way back she glances over her shoulder and then, for whatever reason, prances past me to head back to the house.  I could insist that she drop the stick, but I don’t bother.  On my way back I think to look at the willow by the corn crib to see what’s happened to its leaves – amazingly there’s still quite a few green leaves hanging onto its uppermost branches.