Try to Hear the Trickle of Water

December 22, 2010.  Wednesday.

Situation:  I wake up a little earlier than I did yesterday, 15 minutes or so before nine, but just before I get up I hear Moi slamming the door and Mway barking.  After I pee, start up my computer, and get a cup of coffee, Moi comes back in with Mway and tells me they went down to the creek.  So that means I’m stuck with taking Mway for a walk in the afternoon, sometime before I leave for work tonight and when I’m more in a rush.  Last night Moi helped me with setting up my blog, and we discovered that the post I tried to make the other day didn’t appear on the page simply because I hadn’t successfully put any content in it.  We corrected that, and so now there’s a first post on the blog for December 21, 2010, which contains what I wrote up as an introduction.  In three more days, counting this one, I’ll be making my last entry in this journal, and then I’ll start posting each day of the journal up on the blog, exactly a year after they were written.  I’ll still be taking Mway for walks, but I won’t be writing about them – one year of doing this has been enough, more than enough.  I don’t know if I had written this in a different year, if it would have been any more exciting, say in a year when it had rained more, and there might have been more plants to try to identify.  But this is the year I disciplined myself to write about, and so this is the year that you get.  There are some things I wanted to mention in the course of this journal, by way of background, but never got around to.  Maybe I can take the time now and mention them quickly:  This farmhouse in which we live, a log house covered in clapboard, may have been built in the 1700’s by one of the earliest European settlers in this area, famous in local history for being killed by Indians and buried in the cemetery of the village once named after him; I first became aware of the house in the ‘70’s when it was an isolated party house and I played music with friends here, and Moi and I, hearing from my father that it was up for sale (and Moi wanting to move out of the city of Rochester) bought it in 1987 from the guy who owned it, an excommunicated, sneaker-wearing, 70-something-year-old Old Order Mennonite, who was married and soon divorced from a 20-something-year-old English girl; about ten years later Amos Peachy was murdered in his auction barn, his body mutilated with facial stabbings and a “Vietnamese necktie,” by the boyfriend of a young woman whom he had not paid, in his well-known parsimonious fashion, for her sexual favors; shortly after that Peachy’s family put the farmland around us up for auction, several of the local farmers, including an organic farming friend of ours (once jailed for a year for sending fine grades of marijuana to his accountant through UPS), trying to buy it but being outbid by a developer; after which I instituted a zoning challenge to the township, for whom my father was a supervisor and my then employer was solicitor, claiming that, based on the township’s zoning objectives of “maintaining the rural character of the township and preserving prime farmland” (and a bunch of other things), the township had illegally zoned the farmland around us, and indeed all the farmland in the township, by permitting large housing subdivisions to be built in those areas, my zoning challenge eventually ending up in the Court of Common Pleas and found to be “frivolous”; local rumor has it that I lost my job because of these actions, but despite the unsuccessful challenge the township supervisors did change the zoning regulations to preserve the prime farmland of the township, although nothing could be done about the farmland around us; because the development was named S____ Glenn (sic), Moi dubbed our place S____ Swamp, painted the name on our mailbox and across the front of the house next to a scowling Lady Liberty marching forth with an American flag.  So there, that’s all said and out of the way.  There are a number of other things I also would’ve liked to have mentioned, maybe more about family matters, about Moi making corn husk faces from the corn around us, having peacocks, ducks, and geese, and growing pumpkins, about the kids growing up (how, for example, the Boy, when he was about 14, drove transmission-broken minivans backwards through the old orchard), and certainly more about the dogs we had before Mway -- Spot and Blue (not to mention Moi’s first dog, the all-important Maggie May).  Regarding the dogs, I do think it’s important that I explain how we started taking them for walks in the first place, for at one time we just let them out and let them roam wherever they wanted.  Spot, whom I believe I’ve mentioned once or twice in this journal, was the Australian blue heeler that the kids brought home with them one day (assisted by our neighbor friend) and just unleashed in our bedroom while Moi and I were both in bed sick with the flu.  Spot was a problem dog, but she never strayed far from the house.  However, Blue (a German-shepherd, Australian-cattle-dog mix, whom Moi picked up from one of her friends a few years later) did like to venture far from the house.  He used to pick up a dog friend of his, Rufus, and the two of them would strut over the ridge to Route XXX to beg for food from the places of business along the highway, including a state police barracks.  The only way we knew about this is that eventually we would get calls from the places telling us our dog was there (our phone number being on the collar), with the people on the phone saying, “No problem.  Just wanted to let you know.  He’s a nice dog.  We’re just giving him doughnuts.”  However, eventually a woman who worked at the state police barracks told us that we had to start controlling our dog or there could be serious consequences.  So I started taking Blue and Spot on a walk, with each dog on a leash, up and down our right-of-way over the farm fields every chance I could, and eventually Blue learned to stay around the house, even when he was not on a leash.  When the development came in and houses started to be built along our right-of-way, the walks gradually moved to where Moi and I take Mway for a walk now.  We also found out that by taking the dogs for a walk over our own property, we could keep open a path down to the creek, which we seldom saw in the summer time until we started doing this.  So that’s the origin of our walks with Mway –  a warning from the authorities.

State of the Path:  The halting gait I had yesterday is pretty much gone.  Only about every ten steps or so do I feel my tendon twinge or something and then I lunge forward with a sudden jerk.  Yesterday I asked Moi if she had noticed that there were still leaves on the willow tree – she said she hadn’t; but there they are, still there today – I wonder if this is typical of willows, to hang onto their leaves into winter?  A lot of the trash in the walled garden that Moi hasn’t been burning is strewn about – maybe the chickens have been poking around here looking for food crumbs.  I decide to take the side path, since I haven’t been back that way in a while.  It’s very quiet today; I hear no birds, no sounds from the McNeighborhood, not even the rumbling of traffic from the highways.  The only sounds I hear are the briars, goldenrod stalks, and bare honeysuckles branches brushing against my snow suit, the leaves crunching underfoot, and when I get down past the wigwams, the cracking of frozen dirt and ice underneath the ground.

State of the Creek:  I stop at some rocks to see if I can hear the water trickling, and now I hear a distant plane overhead: I barely hear the trickle of water, like someone trying to say something through the rumble of the plane.  I see a stick stuck in some multiflora branches and make a mental note that this is a stick I can count on if sometime I need a fetching stick.  I stop at the narrows to smash up the white ice formed around some debris, but it’s firm and doesn’t break under my walking stick.  I cross the plank over to the skating pond crest and see a white object in the distance.  When I get closer, I see it’s a glob of white on the car tire -- must be from a bird.  After I round the crest, I spy Mwayla in the skating pond walking through the brown grass amidst the catty-nine-tails.  Later she catches up to me in the path, thrashing through the weeds of the marshy spot between the ridges.

The Fetch:  She passes me by and runs way ahead of me as I step slowly over the ice that crusts up like a rumpled rug around Moi’s pines.  She is waiting for me when I reach the clearing.  We start making the circle, and on about the third fetch, she must prick herself on a little briar stalk that sticks up alone in the middle of the clearing, for I hear her yelp and pick up her paw.  But it must only be a slight jab, for afterwards she makes the round without showing any signs of being hurt, although I have to coax her along a little by playing “put it down.”  I think we even make it as far as a third round.  A couple fetches into that I tell her “good enough.”