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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