I should have known a cleanse is a digestive thing. I mean it’s like being surprised at the colour of an orange. And contrary to evidence, I have not eaten my grey wooly scarf, the alphabet, or your hardwood floor. Also. Can you poop out your intestines?

We had one of those snowfalls yesterday that you know is teetery and temporary, the kind that a single sneeze will ruin, so me and Daisy very carefully walked through the forest holding our breath mostly and man was it gorgeous. I don’t know how a branch the diameter of a straw can hold six vertical inches of snow. It was perfect and the silence was more than silence if you know what I mean. It was quilted. And Daisy kept close and her tail was going in circles the whole time and the lake looked like somebody dropped blue food colouring into a glass of milk.

When you look east there’s a matching forest across the gully where the road goes down to the beach and it’s a dense little forest and nobody really goes there and what with the snow very much describing every tree, you could see there were lots down, as in horizontal, and from where we stood it looked like counting the days. You know. Little collections of four sticks and a bar which makes it five.

So I stored that and hoped I remembered so I could tell you

I don’t take pictures on my walks. I like to think about the things I see so I will remember them and then describe them with words. Of course there’s always a chance I’ll forget because on mornings like yesterday, there’s just too much to remember but I did, and I also remember thinking it might be interesting to mention that I think cameras make you less present and I have tons of videos to prove it.

So my youngest is an equestrian. She is completely undaunted by the beasts she rides while I don’t trust them in the way I don’t trust drunk people or those infected by ego. Know what I mean? You never fucking know with those types.

Anyway she was into show jumping when she was a teenager and of course we went to every one of her shows and I half wanted to watch because she looked so dashing and earnest and elegant in a way reserved for when she was on the back of a horse and I half didn’t want to watch because falling and getting hurt was a real possibility. I mean riders fall off – it’s part of the reason races are so exciting to watch – but I couldn’t watch, at least not with my eyeballs.

Best I could do was follow her around the course with my phone, taking a video, because the lens kind of got in the way of the intensity of the moment and it became less real, less dangerous, less personal. It became just a movie.

So if I’d taken a picture of the counting wall of forest across the way yesterday morning that would have been it. I wouldn’t have been present in the necessary way to get feelings about it and then I’d never get the words to describe it because no need. And maybe later on I’d show the picture to somebody and they’d say cool or neat-o and then maybe I’d instagram it and people would fart it (nice one, spellcheck) heart it and then maybe I’d see it in six months or whatever looking for something else and I might even delete it, you know, depending.

Remember photographer Sean Penn at the end of Walter Mitty? He’d been searching the Himalayas in Afghanistan for the elusive snow leopard for who knows how long and when he finally saw it, face-to-face, he didn’t put the camera between them

One more thing about this cleanse. I am allowed to eat popcorn for which I have a sudden and great affection and also a new affliction. I think it’s the result of consistent wide-mouthed cramming and as we all know popcorn contains shrapnel and it stabs the corners of your mouth and then the salt.

I call my new affliction Popcorn Burn

And I wasn’t even going to post a cartoon this time because it didn’t seem to match the content and then Hark! I remembered Harold, and he seemed just right.