Ice on the Creek

December 21, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  Last night I didn’t get home from my job until 2 am, so this morning I wake up later than I have been, about 10.  Right away Moi needs me to follow her into town while she takes her car to Kantz’s.  When I get back home, some rush work comes in by email, so I rush around to fix my breakfast of Ramen noodle stir fry with food from my Sunday job and to get dressed.  Everywhere I step, Mway seems to be at my heels, staring up at me.  I finish up my work and get home about 4.  I have to take Moi in to get her car, and when I get back I put on my snow suit and boots (because I have the snow suit on to protect me from briars, I figure I can just wear my lounging-around clothes underneath, what Moi calls my “fat pants”).  Before I step outside I remember to check the music room for sticks, where I find the birch branch.

State of the Path:  I try to walk as normally as I can, following Moi’s advice that I should not tense up my muscles but try to work them instead, and this seems to help a little with my walking.  Yet my walk could still be described as a halting gait, since I pause when my left foot is forward and my hip is swiveling and right leg is readying to return to a forward position.  A sliver of red hangs in the western horizon.  I see some little birds in the shrubs around the walled garden, but the light is too dim for me to be embarrassed that I probably don’t know what they are anyhow.  I keep my eyes on the path, my thoughts on trying to even out the motion of my two legs.  Before bug land, the path becomes choppy, the ground torn up, I guess, from ice and water.

State of the Creek:  At the log jam, I poke at the ice.  It stays firm.  Around the root and the debris that sticks out from the creek bank, there’s a higher shelf of thin white ice, which I smash to pieces, and as I’m doing that, my stick plunges through the main ice right close to the bank.  As I walk along the creek, I notice the rocky spots are ice free, the pools covered with transparent ice, and the branch and leaf debris surrounded by more thin, white ice shelves.

The Fetch:  Mway gets way ahead of me, and as I’m slowly coming up to the clearing, she runs part way down the path to meet me, then runs back, waits a moment, then runs down part way again and back.  We make the circle, Mway spinning and barking between fetches.  It seems to me that I’m bending over quicker than I was yesterday.  The birch branch, covered with teeth marks, has withstood weeks of Mway’s chewing on it, but it’s impossible to tell it was once a birch, its bark completely gone.  Two pitches into the second round, we play “Put it down” twice.  Then I tell Mway “that’s enough” and we head down the path where I’m surprised to still see a gash of red on the horizon.