Zipper Pinches My Neck

December 6, 2010.  Monday.

Situation:  I have to work today.  Moi has not gone hunting; she says it’s too windy.  Perhaps it is, but out the office window I only see a few bare branches sway slightly, if at all.  I don’t think she’s taken Mway for a walk; she’s still in her bathrobe.  Squeak’s on my lap.  Although I don’t see much wind I seem to hear it roaring around the house – and, there, now I see whole trees moving.  It looks cold out there in the drab brown fields, and I’m not looking forward to going out.  I just heard Moi let Mway out the door, telling her “you’re a damn fool.”

State of the Path:   I keep my sweatshirt on, part of my lounging-around clothes, and put on my snow suit.  I find the birch branch next to my boots.  Outside, Moi wants to take a picture of me and Mway with her iPhone for some reason;  I call Mway, but she keeps coming and going, and Moi has to take a quick shot while Mway’s looping around my legs.  Walking down the sidewalk, I think it doesn’t seem too bad outside, but when I get to the pig pen I feel otherwise; my chin and wrists are especially cold.  I zip up my snow suit as high as it goes.  The path is soggy in places, crunchy in other spots.  There’s a few flecks of frost.  Mway takes the side path, and I follow.  Past the cedar, some of the gill-of-the-ground below the brown goldenrod is withered and pasted to patches of ice, but others of it lie burgeoning in full leaf.  Through the maples I scare out a small flock of birds, those that, righly or wrongly, I always think of as mourning doves.  Down by the creek, the bare spots of ground on the path are crinkled.  The pin oak branches and multiflora briars make grabs for my cap, but I manage to stop or duck just in time before they can snatch it away.  We don’t bother going over to the crest of the skating pond.  The water in the marshy spot between the ridges looks like it has iced up, but the streak of water in the path on the other side of the ridge is still liquid.

State of the Creek:  All the branches that were in the log jam are gone – the last few were pushed up onto the bank by the last flood.  All that remains there are two multiflora shrubs on either side that throw out branches to each other across the water.  Moi’s green plant is still there in the cascade but it looks a little more scanty.  Just beyond it I see where the floodwaters have pushed up some dirt from some mounds of grass that jut into the creek.

The Fetch:  I again make the circle tossing the stick.  A couple times Mway runs off in the wrong direction, but she manages to find the stick without me having to walk all the way up to it myself.  When I bend over, the zipper of my snow suit pinches my neck.  There are small patches of ice in the middle of the clearing.  We make the circle – I don’t know how many times.   As soon as Mway comes back and just keeps chomping on the stick, I tell her “that’s it.”