Attention [with] dog — Jan 11, 2023

Jan 11.1
Each morning, our weekday walk routine seems to inch a little later. Today we’re stepping out at 6:10am, and all the while every day beyond the winter solstice brings the timing of the sunrise closer. By the time our morning walks begin to touch daybreak we’ll probably hit daylight savings and the clocks will lurch forward while we return to walking in the dark again.

There is frost on the car windows as we pass. But not the fancy crystalline frost that crawls across the glass in splinters and prisms, just plain-old frozen condensation. Trixie wants a shorter walk this morning, but I veto that inclination. As we haltingly make our approach to 26th street Trixie finds another dead rat. Smaller, stretched out right in the middle of the sidewalk. I am too busy moving her away from it too look more closely for a visible cause of death.

On 26th Street there is chirping, but a freight train is also approaching from the east, which puts a damper on the birdcall identification until it’s come and gone. We cross the street to watch it pass below the steep embankment. A CSX coal train, it blows heavily on its horn as it reaches the next tunnel. Trixie is unimpressed.

The train is gone within minutes, and the street returns to its normal sounds. Meanwhile, in a treeless tree well Trixie has found a spot of grass in which to do her business. Last year, a pumpkin patch grew here. Most likely the result of past-their-prime Halloween pumpkins. I’m all for it. I should plant pumpkin patches in every single tree well in the city. The rest of the walk is a quiet one, except for the noise of distant traffic.

Jan 11.2
Made it out the door for a 5:00pm walk. The familiar sweetly sour citrus smell is in the air again. Still unsure what the source is. There is broad cloud cover across the northern sky, and the street right now seems notably bird-less. I pass the ragged river birch, an easy identification for me at this point, especially with its stark visual contrast to the ambiguous trunks of a million other trees. I have recently learned that, in a way, there’s no such thing as a tree. They’re just something that some plants do when they want to get big. Dandelions and strawberries are descended from trees. Maple and mulberry trees are descended from something very un-treelike. If you’re a plant, “tree” is just a verb.

Walking further, I’m struck by how often neighbors use English Ivy as an alternative to dealing with a front yard. Just slap a fence around the chunk of dirt in front of their house and let the ivy go wild while keeping it off the facade. Pragmatic, I suppose, and not uncommon in this neighborhood, despite English Ivy’s aggressively invasive nature. Other homeowners take an even more minimalist approach to low-maintenance landscaping. Rocks and shrubbery. A tree in the middle, maybe a shrub in the corner, and everything else is rocks. It’s not unreasonable. Rowhouse front yards can be a lot of work without much value beyond the purely aesthetic. That said, in the past I have seen a neighbor with a dense patch of yellow corn growing in a yard that’s barely 6’ x 6’, so maybe these folks just aren’t thinking big enough.

It’s corn! A big lump with knobs. It has the juice. I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing.

With a little extra time to spare, Trixie and I continue down Calvert all the way to 26th before turning left to loop back to the house. The 26th Street Green provides a nice little reprieve from staying attuned to traffic concerns. A half-block of road converted to public pedestrian space surrounded with large custom-built wooden planters. The setup is less than two years old, so it will be interesting to see what it becomes over time. I’m less inclined to examine the contents of the planters. They’re beautifully provisioned each season, but it all gets torn out and replanted on a regular basis. The plants here seem to mostly be exotic tourists from out of town.

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Shifting Northwards on Guilford there is suddenly the strong smell of artificial citrus again. Possibly dryer sheets or detergent from somewhere? It leaves as quickly as it comes. At the base of a tree just before 27th there is a bright splash of green growth against the dark earth. Something that looks like tulip leaves growing from a ginger-like rhizome. A quick photo search suggests that it’s some sort of Iris. Bearded Iris? Won’t know for sure until it grows a bit more.

Iris tubers are toxic. Please do not eat them.

Just past 27th another tree catches my attention. Its canopy spreads above one of Trixie’s favorite pooping places, and the low-hanging branches give her shelter during that personal and intimate activity. Beyond these fundamental matters, what is interesting about this tree is that the leaves are brown and dried, but unfallen. Marcescence again. It is some sort of oak, and it shares its tree well with a second tree that looks for all the world like a mostly denuded avocado plant — a few waxy football-shaped leaves are still hanging onto its otherwise empty branches. Magnolia? Maybe so, but there’s another magnolia that I regularly pass that has retained almost all of its leaves well into winter. I know the word for it, but the why of it is opaque to me. Why one and not the other? More to learn. More to learn.

Jan 11.3
Our third walk is an earlier one today. Trixie inspects the sweet gum tree and its sibling neighbor in the adjacent tree well. Sometime during our previous walk, I must have stepped in half-dry dog shit, as the unmistakable odor emanates from my shoe. Didn’t notice earlier today, and there are no nearby grassy patches to shuffle my shoes across. Dragging my feet on the cold dry pavement will have to do.

Felix appears unchanged and we move past him without slowing. Trixie is deep in the olfactory world tonight. She pauses repeatedly to snuffle here and there. From my own perspective, I smell nothing out of the ordinary. Wind is blowing from the south as we walk up Barclay. It brings with it a slight burning scent that I can’t quite place. Reaching 29th, there’s a cross-breeze that carries the smell of baking. Probably from McDonald’s. Does baking still happen there? Passing by the school as we walk along 29th I realize that the tree closest to its nearby exit door is in fact also a magnolia tree. How many trees have I known but not noticed that I knew? Continuing down 29th I smell soap. Dish soap. Like a multitude of hands washing themselves with Dawn. When we turn onto Guilford the smell is gone, replaced by the familiar waft of wood smoke. It seems to be a different type of wood than was burning yesterday, but I just have no way of knowing.

These unanswerable questions that emerge from my ignorance are galling me. In a momentary flight of fancy, I imagine a systematic smell differentiation and association exercise where I build nightly campfires over a period of weeks or even months — each night burning a different type of wood, and each time spending the evening with a different friend or companion so that I can memory-associate the distinctive woodsmoke odors of different trees with specific individuals as a relational mnemonic.

“Only fools burn juniper wood,“ the officer said contemptuously. “We have been on Kostos all day and most of the night. A dead man could have smelt it.”

Maybe if this was a hundred years ago, I would just effortlessly know what sort of wood was being burned, along with so many other things that I am merely fumbling towards right now. To be fair, there are many things I wouldn’t know a century ago. Mostly related to comic books and TV shows, probably. And a little bit of HTML.

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