Whichever Way Mway Goes

August 8, 2010.  Sunday.

Situation:  This morning I search “bindweed” online, and at wikipedia I find a perfect photo of the white trumpet-shaped flower I’ve been seeing, and behind it I can just make out the arrow-shaped leaves.  So, though it’s all in the morning glory family, bindweed it is.  Work all day today, and when I get home, about 6:30, I say to Moi, “Well, I guess I’ll take the little dog for a walk,” half-hoping perhaps that she’ll tell me that she’s just done that herself.  Instead she says, “Oh, she’ll be thrilled about that.”

State of the Path:  The ground, as it has been for the last couple weeks, is hard and almost as white as it was at the beginning of July.  At the juncture to the side path, I tell myself, “Whichever way Mway goes, I go.”  Mway stays straight on the main path.  Down at the start of bug land, I look at the big “chokeberry” bush, its berries now mostly dark green, blue, purple, black, gray, with whitish areas, somehow moonish when taken altogether.  The bush is surrounded by jewelweed, still flowering somewhat but not popping seeds, and below it is an ironweed plant around which I see flittering and flower-sipping a tiger swallowtail (yellow swallowtail?).  Down by the creek, I remark to myself how a stand of jewelweed survived the dry summer up by the “chokeberry” but how another disappeared totally around the plastic barrel, though there are many stands of jewelweed right along the creek.  On the ridge around bug land, there’s another big “chokeberry” bush I never noticed before, its berries as black, purple, blue, or whatever as the one at the other end of bug land.

State of the Creek:  Beneath the tree stand, what water is there, if there is water there, looks from the creek bank like a splotch of mud.   The vinyl siding – should I now say it’s about 5 feet from the piddling puddle of water? At the edge of the puddle is a big flat rock, its top white dry.

The Fetch:  I don’t see any flowers of bindweed at the clearing – are they like day lilies and chickory, in bloom only for a day?  I don’t see Mway anywhere and have to call out to her.  She soon comes running up the path.  One fetch – and, no questions asked, back to the house.  At the porch she drops the stick at the door.  Instead of putting it on top of the bench, I toss it underneath it.  Tomorrow Barb Dennehy will again be watching Mway, and I don’t want her to carelessly lose it.  Moi and I are again making a trip, this time to meet part of her family up at Akwesasne, where they’re all heading to renew their Indian cards. We’ll be away for a couple days, so there will be no walk for Mway from me on Tuesday, and, if there is any on Monday or Wednesday, perhaps no time to write about it afterwards.

Walk a Little Difficult Because of Big Pimple

August 2, 2010.  Monday. 

Situation:  I have work to do today sometime, and I’ll probably wait until this afternoon to take Mway for her walk.  This morning Moi tells me that she let Squeak outside for five minutes, that she bounded after a bird, and that she managed to return inside when Moi let Mway back inside.  Squeak for a long time has been afraid to go outside.  She has been watching birds attracted by the trumpet vine on our front porch through the front screen door, but if we open up the door Squeak generally leaps back in fear.  A couple weeks ago Squeak did sneak outside twice: one time she was immediately surrounded by threatening chickens and Moi had to rescue her, the second time was at night and she ended up trembling all night under the back porch.  Going outside and coming back inside this morning maybe represents a breakthrough for Squeak; maybe she’s beginning to understand how doors work, something of course that Mway understands very well.  Last night after our walk, at some point Mway slammed the bedroom door shut while I was walking past it in the hall (this is part of that stupid game that the Boy and I inadvertently taught her where after she slams the door shut then we’re supposed to leer at her through the transom window while she leaps up in anger at our leering faces -- one time while playing this game she accidentally bit the Boy in the nose).  We’ve never been able to communicate to her not to do this any more, and this action reveals to me what I do mean when I make a statement such as “who knows what goes on in that dog’s mind?”  I come back from work about 3.  I expect Moi and Mway to be taking a nap, but Moi is out painting the back porch, and Mway is running around the yard.  I decide to take Mway for her afternoon walk.  Fortunately, Moi is aware of my fondness for the “pro-quality” stick, and although she’s cleared if off the porch, I find it easily where she pitched it on the ground.

State of the Path:  I would bring the clippers with me today, but I hope to mow the lawn right after I take this walk (there’s a threat of rain), and I’m in a hurry.  The walk is made a little difficult today because I’ve developed a big pimple on the back of my thigh, caused maybe by wearing my dirty walking clothes (how often should I wash them?) but I think more likely caused by a pair of cut-off jeans I’ve been wearing around the house that are slightly too big for me and ride down my leg.  (I had Moi check the pimple to make sure it wasn’t a tick bite.)  Just down to the creek and back.  Watch out for bull thistles spared from my clippers.  Past the wigwams, where the bracken died and turned brown earlier this summer, there’s a new growth of bracken coming up.  Along the creek, there’s a thread-like growth over the jewelweed, and I wonder if it’s part of the seed system (Audubon mentions nothing about it).   More flowers are coming out on the ironweed, but still only the one plant along the path above the ridge is beginning to look truly like the photo in Audubon.

State of the Creek:  No change from yesterday evening.  The water in the pool along the narrows has receded to about a foot away from the vinyl siding.

The Fetch:  Mway fetches the stick once, then gives me the same eye she did last night.  I wave my hand with a gesture of dismissal and tell her, “Go.  Get back to the house.”

Realize Mway Is, After All, Conscious

August 1, 2010.  Sunday.

Situation:  Work all day today, and when I come back, about 6:30, I say to Moi, “I suppose Mway wants to go for a walk.”  Moi, relaxing on the sofa, says, “Yeah, she can go on a walk.  But I’ve fed her already.”  Mway is excited that I’ve come home, and I see her scoot into the music room, as if that’s a waiting room where she can sit for a while preliminary to going for a walk with me.  I go upstairs to take off my work clothes (for the summer, a pair of dress slacks, loafers, and the Hawaiian shirt Jazz bought for me at a Wal-Mart on her honeymoon in Hawaii) and put on my walking clothes.  When I come back downstairs, Mway shoots out of the music room, and, while I’m putting on my boots, garden gloves, and safari helmet, circles the kitchen table a couple times.  I have an inkling of a realization, seeing this, that, while Mway certainly associates taking a walk and fetching stick as work connected to her getting fed, to a large extent she likes to go for a walk simply for the sake of going for a walk.

State of the Path:  At the outbuilding, Mway raises her snout in the air as if she sees something in the building, but I look toward the upstairs window and see nothing.  Out on the path, I’m certainly glad that I clipped down some of the weeds these past few days, for while I still wouldn’t want to walk on this path in shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt, it definitely is a lot easier walking now.  I see that it wouldn’t hurt, though, to do another round of clipping, especially to cut back some of the grasses that I missed.  Under the pin oaks, where the ground looks like an autumn scene, looks to me like one of Hutchinson’s no-trespassing signs is lying on the ground.  The elderberries have ripened and turned purple, but they are not as copious as I’ve seen them in some past years.  I realize I haven’t been tripping over the loopy vine down by the creek; it seems to me it moved to the left a foot or two.  Just beyond it is the bull thistle, which I do have to keep my eyes open for, and just beyond the bull thistle are the few flowers of fringed loosestrife.  When I pass through the red willows into bug land, the sun is shining bright for a moment on this otherwise cloudy day.  I walk over to the biggest tall ironweed; its flowers are still not opening as far they might, and the center flowers are now dried up.  Up on the way to the strawberry patch is another tall ironweed plant, which has one flower that looks like the flowers shown in the photo in Aububon.

State of the Creek:  It was supposed to rain today, but it hasn’t, and the creek is losing more water.  The bed is dry underneath the big locusts; the water at the log jam is reduced to a puddle; the vinyl siding is completely dry, and it looks like there’s moss on it.  The creek has become a group of disconnected pools of water as it was before.

The Fetch:   I toss the stick once for Mway.  She runs after it, picks it up, then comes running back to me, with the long stick waving in her mouth.  I realize, as she’s eyeing me and looking for a sign from me, that, if I told her to put it down, she would.  She might prefer just to fetch the stick once and head back to the house (and I do nod and indicate to her that she can keep on running with the stick in her mouth), but she’s willing to put aside her desire and mold her actions to what she interprets to be my own desire, if I so communicate it to her.  And I realize at that moment that statements that I’ve made in the past such as “who knows what goes on in that dog’s mind” are, if interpreted in a certain way, totally inappropriate and unthinking on my part, because what goes on in her mind is no more predictable or knowable than what goes on in Moi’s mind, or my own mind – that what goes on in there is always open to negotiation, open to communication, open to what is going on in other minds, as it would be for Moi or me, that Mway is not just a concatenation of reflexes running on instinct, but is, after all, conscious, aware of a future of possibilities, if limited in scope and number.  On the way back to the house, I see that Mway, who had run way ahead of me, has dropped the stick along the path, apparently drawn away from carrying it back to the porch by another possibility that presented itself.  I pick the stick up, and when I reach the yard, Mway growls slightly, grapples the stick out of my hand, and resumes carrying it to the porch.

Wish I Brought the Clippers Today

July 31, 2010.  Saturday.

Situation:  Again I go through the routine, the morning routine I now know so well (discovering that it’s 8:30 when I get down to the kitchen).  When I pull down Squeak’s dish to put a wedge of cat food in it, I find that the wedge I put in it yesterday is still there, dried up – I don’t know why, but Squeak doesn’t eat up the canned food I give to her; fortunately, she has other dry cat food in the laundry room she can eat, so I don’t worry about this.  Last night when I came home from work, I stepped in some dog poop in front of the kitchen sink; yesterday afternoon I only took Mway out in the back yard to fetch stick, and that apparently was not sufficient to get her to evacuate her bowels.  I had seen her pee, but I hadn’t seen her poop (she tends to like to poop on the path).  I work tonight, and I suppose I’ll have to take her at least out to the clearing before I leave.  Since Squeak didn’t eat her food from yesterday, I don’t give her any more today.  I put on my walking clothes, let Mway out the door, go out to take care of the chickens (I realize now I forgot to check for eggs), then Mway and I head for the path.

State of the Path:  In the back yard, there are brown spots in the lawn where the chickens have torn up the grass scratching for handfuls of feed.  Just beyond the walled garden, a crow flies in front of the electric wire and circles back – I don’t think I’ve seen a crow since spring time, and I wonder if they only fly around in spring and autumn.  Mway turns right onto the path toward the clearing (remember, Moi only fetches stick with Mway in the morning, so Mway’s more used to this).  But it’s my intention to take a full walk, and even to go on the side path along the old orchard, so Mway ends up turning around when she sees I’m going off in that direction.  I’ve thought about bringing the clippers with me this morning, but decide to check on the side path first to see how much clipping needs to be done there.  I soon wish that I had brought the clippers.  Some grape vines sprawl out onto the path before the anthills, and some goldenrod hems in the path just beyond.  More grape vine forms a canopy over the path closer to the back hedgerow; in fact, it seems to sprawl onto and form the crown of a tree (one of the boxelders?) that has no leaves of its own.  Near the jack-in-the-pulpits, I lose sight of the path altogether for a moment, confused by bare spots in the ground caused by the drought that steer me in the wrong direction.  Beyond the multiflora bush, I find myself wading through goldenrod and jewelweed for longer than I care to, before I come upon the swatch of path that I had clipped open yesterday.  I see that I will need to bring the clippers with me back here sometime soon.   All along the path, I have to watch out for spider webs strung from the weeds on one side to the weeds on the other.  Down along the creek, it seems I don’t hear the cicadas as loud as they were yesterday (or perhaps I should say “grasshoppers” – the World Book tells me that “grasshoppers ‘sing’ to their mates.  Most species make sounds by rubbing their hind legs against their front wings”).  I walk into and get pricked by a bull thistle (which yesterday I deliberately spared from my clippers).  I look at the tall ironweed, and it bothers me that the petals of their flowers are packed together like paint brushes, so that none of the plants look exactly like the photo in Audubon.  But toward the clearing, I see that the fleabane flowers are still packed together; apparently flowers in general have not opened up all the way yet in the morning sun.  (By the way, yesterday I noticed while going down the lane to get the mail a wildflower that I don’t see out in our fields: some, easily identifiable, chickory, whose flower heads, according to Audubon, “each lasts only a day” and whose “roots can be roasted and ground as a coffee substitute or additive.”)

State of the Creek:  The pool at the log jam is losing water.  Fresh mud in front of the big log thwarts the creek.  The vinyl siding sits completely out of the water, and looks dry.

The Fetch:  Just one fetch this morning – and while this is all right with me, I’m kind of irritated by it, for Mway must know that I’m going to feed her breakfast when we get back.  Maybe Mway has figured out that, no matter how many times she fetches the stick, if I take her out in the morning, she’s going to get fed.  Or maybe she’s just feeling lazy today, or maybe she’s upset that I didn’t take her for a second walk yesterday and she ended up taking a poop in the house.  I have long ago decided that I can’t quite figure out what’s going through her mind, and I don’t know why I’m still speculating about it now.