Yellow Turning Pink

December 7, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  I wake up around 8:45, expecting that Moi has gone out hunting.  But even before I go downstairs, I can tell she’s home: hear the TV murmuring, hear her mumbling to the animals.  She tells me it was too windy to go out this morning, and she says she’s already taken Mway down to the creek.  That means I’m relegated again to an afternoon walk -- I have to work today, and I’ll have to make sure I get home before dark.  Out my office window I see a coating of snow on the ground, just an inch or so, but the first full covering for the season; I’m a little miffed because it would’ve been nice to write about this this morning.  Yesterday morning, while she was not out hunting, Moi wrote a hunting story instead.  It’s about an older hunter who goes out in the woods and, for the first time in his life, decides not to shoot a buck he has a good shot of.  I read it late last night, and Moi asks me this morning what I think about it.  I’m milling around the kitchen, heating up coffee in the microwave, rolling a cigarette.  I tell her that it seems to me that the “older hunter letting the deer go” is a theme that’s been addressed many times before, but that the story has a “quiet subtlety to it.”  “Well, I know the theme’s not original,” she says, “but this is about a hunter who lets the deer go because he can’t see to shoot anymore,” and she goes on to tell me that the story is based on what Ezra has been complaining to her about his father going hunting and that it has many of her own perceptions about hunting in it.  I tell Moi I’ll have to read it again because last night I was distracted by typos.

State of the Path:  By the time I get home from work, about 4:30, most of the snow is gone, the lawn largely green with wisps and patches of white here and there.  I hurry to get into my snow suit, not even changing first into my walking clothes.  Mway paces around the table, at first huffing, then unable to contain herself, bursting into a round of barking, which I tell her to “knock off.”  “She’s been waiting for this all day,” Moi says.  “But you took her for a walk this morning,” I protest.  “A walk’s not a walk until you take her for one,” she retorts.  I pick up several sticks from the music room, one of which I decide would be a good one to toss.  Outside the setting sun is scarring the sky yellow, jagged streaks through heavy blue clouds.  There’s a puddle of water over the cement slabs, thin ice on one edge of Moi’s garden pond.  The path is muddy, only a few flecks of snow under some shrubs.  Goldenrod stalks and briars paw at the sides of my snow suit.  Down at the wigwams, there are streaks of water in the path and at the spillway into bug land.  In bug land itself, the path turns muddy.  I’m happy to be wearing good boots, but my feet feel cold because I’m not wearing my usual wool socks.

State of the Creek:  There are still flecks of snow on the creek bank, which contrast sharply with the quietly running brown stream.  I stop at the former log jam and, with my walking stick, poke at some sort of root, caked with dead leaves and grass, that sticks out into the water, the only remnant of all the debris that used to be jammed up here.  I manage to duck successfully under briars without getting my cap pulled off.  At first I plan not to go over to the crest of the skating pond, but when I see there’s snow on the plank over the feed channel, I decide to walk across it, leaving my foot prints on it.  Under the oaks, it looks like the pool of water there has a lot of small round stones in it which I don’t remember seeing before, and I wonder if these have been washed down by the last flood.  Walking along the ridge of bug land, I see that the yellow streaks in the sky have turned pink.

The Fetch:  I make the circle of tosses, same as I’ve been doing the last few days.  The center of the clearing is a streak of snow; otherwise, it’s brown all around.  I play “Put it down” with Mway once, without actually saying “put it down,” just jabbing my finger, but after that I tell her “that’s enough.”  Back in the house, since Moi’s now up in the bath room, I feed Mway.  When Moi comes out of the bath room, she tells me that this morning she saw paw prints in the snow, “I don’t know if it was from a feral cat, a raccoon, or what.”  “Yeah,” I say to her, “you told me that before.”