touching grass

Before he had a chance to spend much time asking for it, I got my inattentive self together and took Murray toward the door for the day's first walk outside. As he so often does, he paused on the threshold to take in the air of the morning. He looked right, left, and forward, then strode across the porch to the grass, where he got on his butt and scooted a straight line long enough for a first down. And then we were off.

The grass needs cutting, as it has since the day after I cut it, three days ago. Every patch that's ever been dug up by utility guys (about the footprint of three or four vans) was subsequently reseeded--they may think they're doing good--with some alien fescue that grows like bamboo as soon as an hour after being leveled through brute force. You can see by the dandelions where we park off-driveway (in plowing season, because the plow guy only feels obligated to plow as far as he can go without plowing a section that's touched anywhere by a part of a car, so we go all the way off the paving). Kathryn says they grow where the ground is too compact, and car parking spots seem to fill that bill. I will obtain a pitchfork and stab the ground there to show it who's boss. The wind blew, as it always does, so there were more pieces of the tree to pick up and pile in the gutter. A solid chunk of trunk was on the ground, solid insofar as being heavy, but it's spongy mush, like every other part of the thing that ever comes down. It's mostly sawdust held together by bark, but a great tree for a little girl and her friends.

Murray and I made our happy way along trails of scent, passing the home of Lucy, who surprised us by not barking at every window as we went by. Also silent were the Shih Tzus two houses down, whose names I haven't yet learned. Once I know them, I'll say hi to them quietly, just like I do Lucy. Murray and the poop bag and I proceeded down the block. He wanted to sniff a yard with a "sprayed" sign in it, but I urged him across the street, where the black dog and the white dog barked at us from somewhere inside. "They won't poison their pets," I reasoned to Murray.

I kept watching the rise of the hills visible past the end of the block. As we're on a named hill, the ground went down first, then level (Knickerbocker's field), and then rose up again on the other side of the canal. In Colorado growing up, I always knew the mountains were in the west. I noticed this morning that now they're on the east, and they're old Appalachians instead of Rockies, but a hill's a hill, and we have hills. A couple of the lately ubiquitous utility trucks were coming our way, so I walked over to the other side to let them pass, and of course they had to drive right around us. Triumphant at having mildly annoyed men doing their jobs, I turned us for home at the butterfly garden on the tiny island at the corner of our street and itself.

Home again, home again, with Murray in his "anywhere but home" mode. I could close my eyes and know that as long as Murray pulled a hundred eighty degrees against it, I was heading straight home. (Thanks to the Junior Woodchucks of America for this knowledge!) Sighing a final one at the lawn, which I intend to cut today, I dragged my companion to the garage and let him stand and probe the shaggy back yard (where deer hang out and bunnies and groundhogs play and a fox passes through regularly) for a minute and run in to grab a bite and take vitamins. Can't mow a forest of headless dandelion stems on an empty stomach.

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All Quiet on the KW Cleanup [aka pt 2]

 Poking diligently through various boxes and containers, and not getting in deep, but tossing and reboxing. I bought a flat of 15 folding boxes at Staples so we can fill boxes up and dispatch them. First we'll move things out of irregular boxes and into regular ones, giving away the irregular ones first. 

So what did I actually do? Glad you asked! I looked at pens and pencils. There are still a lot in the box, but it won't happen in a day or a session. I know what to watch out for.

Here's how it works with comics: I'll sort along bravely for a while, making the tough decisions and letting the chips fall and getting things ready to go out. THEN my brain starts to fill up with teeny styro particles and it gets to a sort of tipping point where I start to say things like "But this is the only example I have (or the best one) of X, and I should had oughtta..." At this point, if I don't stop sorting and go somewhere else, I'll start taking things OFF the pile I've already chosen to go out. And it works the same way with other things.

So I have thrown out a bunch of pens. I throw out the ones that don't write, though I keep a very few which are extraordinarily novel or which possess great personal beauty. And what are these styro pellets?

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The KW Cleanup, part 1.

 Off she goes. The first sibling to visit us here is headed back to the UP of MI, leaving our house better than she found it. By request! I asked her if she'd help me in organizing and tossing things, and she did, accomplishing some minor miracles and leaving a framework for additional work to be done by, well, I guess, me. Heh. So I intend to carry through on this and, blog willing, blog it.

We started (I was there too!) in the guest room, where she slept (and where Murray is still entitled to use the bed, of course), egging me into sorting, classifying, and discarding enough that the rest went together neatly, leaving the field open for me to ruthlessly scour all the paper and near-paper piles (metaphor: They're in boxes) that constitute the Fanac bulge.

Across the hall, the fearsome box room awaited, and we made some structural changes to the spinal system of metal shelves as to allow for some sorting, so now I can make forays into the closet with all the boxes that I piled in there because they were the kind of stuff that can be quickly sorted and decided upon. I call that "mush." Many of these boxes say MUSH on them. I shall mush them.

I'm attracted to the idea of finite collections, allowed to fit a certain space and combed as needed, like Robert Crumb's 78 shelf. 

Tired of writing. Rest now. Anyway, a new label, hashtag, whatever: KW CLEANUP. More when I think of it. Oh yeah, here's one: planning to use low-impact method of sorting what's visible on top so I don't make a mess when I open a box. No big commitment, no "temporary" pile in the middle of the floor. That sort of thing. 

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