Mway Knows Something Was Around

August 28, 2010.  Saturday.

Situation:  This morning Moi enlists me in a lot of chores.  First, last night she caught an opossum in the trap cage she set in the garden, and she wants me to carry it down to the creek, where we’ll let it go.  Mway would like to come along, but we leave her in the house.  I’m struck by the pink W.C. Fields snout of the opossum; it’s probably its natural color, but it looks like it could be stained from tomatoes or bloodied from poking through the cage.  It takes us a little while to figure out how to open up the cage to let it out.  Next, Moi wants me to hold the ladder so she can paint the frame of my bedroom window which she can’t get at from inside because of an air conditioner.  Moi is very skittish about ladders: “Why’d the ladder just move?”  “Don’t worry. I just let go for a minute to scratch my face.”  As I’m moving the ladder: “Watch out, you just stepped in dog shit.”  Going into the house to get a cigarette: “You just walked into the house with dog shit on your boots?”  It’s a sunny, bustling Saturday morning:  a lawn tractor or two in the distance; the coo of mourning doves; a McNeighbor shouting at his McChild; the bucking of chickens as they come over to see if we’re dribbling feed; a woman’s voice over a loudspeaker at the tractor pull on O__ C_____ road.  When we’re done, I decide to whack down some of the weeds around the garden, and then, since I already have my walking clothes on, to take Mway for her walk.  It’s about 12:30.  Moi and I both work at separate places tonight. I’m happy to get the walk out of the way.  I select a new fetching stick that I spotted under the lilac bush the other day; it’s long and will double as a walking stick like the old “pro-quality” stick used to do.

State of the Path:  I decide to take the side path along the old orchard, which I haven’t gone on for a while.  Red jack-in-the-pulpit seed cobs brighten their little patch of ground.  I step through the monkey vine portal.  Most of the virgin’s bower is already gone.  I again see a bumblebee disappear inside a touch-me-not.  As we approach the creek, I wonder if we’ll run into the opossum.  Black berries still dangle from the “chokeberry” bushes; their leaves are turning red and shriveling.  Under the deer stand, Mway starts sniffing the ground; she knows there was some kind of creature here.  The bull thistle is all fuzz.  I can’t find any “creeping bush clover” today.  Ironweed and boneset still bloom in bug land.  Heal-all still comes up along the path.  On the other side of the ridge, I’m especially careful how I walk; my foot is getting better, but it’s still sensitive.  Cabbage butterflies, a black swallowtail, flutter ahead of me.  Grasshoppers leap from one goldenrod stem to the next.

State of the Creek:  Near the big locust trees, on the opposite bank of the creek, is a small oak tree, whose bottom of its trunk lies exposed above a cavity in the bank.  Around it is a big clump of sod supported by the trees roots.  I reflect that this is also a good place for something or other to live around.  A monkey vine winds around the trunk of the tree.  Today all of the vinyl siding is sticking out of the water.

The Fetch:  Mway has to get used to the new stick, especially since it has branch notches.  She bites into it especially hard, to get her saliva all over and her teeth marks into it.   A good number of fetches today – Mway likes the stick, as she would any stick.

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.