An early morning walk: crows, robins, jays, a red-winged black bird. At one point a plump bunny hopped through the dewy meadow grass. The air was thin and clean. It made me think of a Robert Browning poem I used to read the girls:
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his heaven —
All’s right with the world!
When a writer can’t write, she has writer’s block. When a walker can’t walk, does she have walker’s block? Or what if the walker only has time for a quick walk, a walk around the block, but she doesn’t have a block to walk around?
Such is the case here in the suburbs. Because most people don’t want to live on cut-through streets, we have plenty of cul-de-sacs but precious few connectors. Instead of walking around the block, with the pleasant circularity that entails, we walk up one side of the road and down another.
To get around this linearity, I’ve come up with loop walks. I cross West Ox, a busy, four-lane road at the west end of our neighborhood, down a slight hill, left into Franklin Farm, through a meadow, along a paved path in a small woods and eventually back to West Ox and into Folkstone again. It isn’t a block, but it is a walk. A walker’s block.
Walking in the city, on the trudge to and from Metro or at lunchtime when I stroll around the Mall, I can’t help but listen in. “We only have two months.” “I said 15 not 50.” “Do you think she’ll be able to pull that off?” Everywhere I walk there are conversations to be overheard. I’ve come to think of it as “eaveswalking.” It’s not as intentional as eavesdropping but it’s almost as satisfying.
Then what of the walker in the suburbs? My eaveswalking here is a mostly silent affair. But still, the houses talk to me. When I walk through our neighborhood each house has a story. Sometimes the story is about the people who live there now, but other times it’s about people who lived in that house five, ten years ago.The family with four boys who used to play football in the front yard. The boys grew up; the family moved away. The man who planted a beautiful perennial garden. His wife once admitted, “I don’t love gardening but I love the gardener.” The gardener died three years ago. His wife moved back to California. But the flowers still bloom every summer.
On a walk yesterday I spied a path I’d never noticed before. I followed the trail, let it take me across a bridge, past clumps of skunk cabbage and a forest floor carpeted with violets and spring beauties.
As I walked I wondered what it is about paths that so appeal to me? “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,” the poet Byron wrote. “There is a rapture on the lonely shore.” Though I, too, love the wilderness, I also love the sight of a beaten dirt track curving around a bend. Do all humans share a hard-wired appreciation for this parting in the forest, for this passage through the briars? Or am I the only one? To me a path is proof that others have gone before us, that there is a way through this tangled treescape, which, lovely though it may be, is still not our home, our yard, our world.
Prescribe walking to a walker in the suburbs and she will put in the miles. Yesterday I took two walks, a short one in the morning and a long one in the afternoon.
The short one, which happened on the way home from the post office, meandered through Horsepen Run Stream Valley Park, across a stream, under a road (through a tunnel) and up along a rise on the other side. It was still chilly and the air was crisp and clear. Morning walks are full of promise.
The long walk took me from my house all the way to the Reston Trails and back. I took my camera and snapped this photo of the small farm in the neighborhood behind us. Every time I walk there I marvel at what a treasure it is. There are five-acre parcels for folks who like horses, and if you use your imagination a little, you could be a hundred miles away. It was just what the doctor ordered for a soft spring day.
This weekend’s walks were as much liquid as solid. Moisture clung to my hair and face. My breath came in clouds, and my skin felt clammy and alive. It was invigorating to walk in the mist, to feel heaven and earth as one. The weekend’s weather brought to mind a nursery rhyme that begins, “One misty moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather, I chanced to meet an old man, dressed all in leather.” I’m not sure leather was the best garment choice this weekend.
Astute followers of these posts will notice that for a blog that calls itself “A Walker in the Suburbs” there’s been precious little walking going on. Let’s blame that on the snow and on sciatica (perhaps shoveling-induced although its exact origin is a mystery) — both of which have kept me inside. But I did venture out yesterday and I noticed that one house I’ve always wondered about, a house obscured by thick evergreens, is now partially exposed due to a downed tree. This place was always a mystery. Because I couldn’t see the house at all, I imagined it to be quite different from the other models in our neighborhood. Elegant and refined, with the whiff of an English country estate about it. But now its secret is out. It’s just another house, I’m sorry to say. But if I know evergreens, the trees that remain will quickly spread and offer a blessed screen. And then, once again, we will have mystery.