Bare Feet

Bare Feet

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Warm weather outside means warm floors inside, so off come the two pairs of socks, the thin ones and the thick ones with non-slip soles. It has been months since I walked without socks or slippers, and I’m surprised by the textures, by the interesting news my feet bring me about the world. My toes dig into the carpet fibers as if they were sand on the beach. And when I step outside for the newspaper my soles are shocked by the cold hard surface. I had forgotten how bare feet feel.

This brings to mind a line from “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poem in praise of the creator and creation: “Nor can foot feel, being shod.”

In bundling up for winter we numb the senses. We have to. And in spring comes an awakening not just of nature but of our capacity to appreciate it.

The next lines of the poem are: “And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” It is the way I feel today barefoot — that the elements I usually ignore are waiting to restore me.
Setting Goals

Setting Goals

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She carried a flashlight, so I could spot the goal-setter a mile down the road. It was my neighbor, Nancy, another walker in the suburbs, though a more regular one. It was well before dawn but she was already pounding the pavement.

About 12 years ago Nancy started fast-walking in earnest. She started, she said, because she had to use it or lose it. She keeps going for the same reason.

I caught her late one afternoon on her second walk of the day and asked her why she was out again. “I was two miles short of my goal,” she said. “Twenty miles a week.”

We talked some more, about routes and roads, suburban stuff, but all the while I’m thinking about goals. Setting them, keeping them, how they work to keep us young. How goals of distance are more weighty and tangible than goals of time. Twenty miles a week is a thousand miles a year. That’s from here to Kentucky and back. It’s a lot of miles to walk, a big goal to keep.

I don’t keep track of my miles. Maybe I should.

Poetry at Noon

Poetry at Noon

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I almost didn’t go, had too many papers on my desk to feel right about leaving them behind, but my friend Michele Wolf was reading from her new book Immersion so I walked 20 minutes to a building made of words, took a seat and let the images flow into my brain.

It was a good decision. The verse filled me full as any food. They were love poems — love for children, for parents, for spouse — and they trembled and soared; they skittered to the edge of the abyss, stood still and stared it down.

On the way home, my path was filled with light. All the buildings had softened edges.

Unkindest Cut

Unkindest Cut

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Walks in the suburbs this weekend revealed the full damage from our recent snowstorm. Trees without tops, our own witch hazel decapitated. Large limbs littering yards and driveways. And in the woods, downed trees block paths.

The pears and fir trees took it hardest. They are bent and broken. But there is scarcely a yard that’s untouched. The light brown of sheared wood stands in stark contrast to the silvery gray of weathered trunks.

This is nature’s way of pruning dead wood. But unlike the gardener who trims kindly and judiciously, wicked weather takes what it wants. Its methods are ruthless not artful. The unkindest cut.

A Valentine

A Valentine

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I had just started this blog last year when Valentine’s Day rolled around. It was Sunday, and though I hadn’t yet developed a six-day-a-week rhythm for Walker, I took that day off.

This, then, is my first Valentine’s post —and the first about my valentine.

You may have met him in these pages before. He flits through them often: steadying my nerves, buoying my mood, even helping me begin this blog. He might cringe a little when I tell him that I’ve used a photo of our messy garage to illustrate one of my posts, but not enough to make me feel bad. For more than 20 years we’ve been raising children, keeping house, drinking endless cups of tea on Sunday mornings— sharing our lives. He is always there for me. He is calm and happy and forever a good sport.

While I sit around musing and pecking on my laptop, Tom is fixing a door, balancing an account, building a fire. He has the enviable ability to lose himself in his work, chores and hobbies. He is, always has been and always will be his own indisputably unique self. And most important, he has a heart of gold. Is it any wonder, then, that he was born on Valentine’s Day?

Happy Birthday, Tom!

House Dress

House Dress

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The house dress was a shapeless garment worn by grandmothers and great aunts. Simple cotton frocks in floral prints, they were what women wore when they didn’t plan on going out, when the chores of the day kept them inside, when they would never consider wearing pants.

I heard a radio report the other day on the evolution of the modern home that included this numbing statistic: In the 1920s, the average woman spent about five hours a day in the kitchen. A house dress must have been comfortable attire for scouring the oven, baking bread or running clothes through a wringer. Shapeless and liberating. No girdle required.

No woman I know wears a house dress now, unless you count some modern iterations that have little in common with their frumpy forebears. But I haven’t been home five minutes when I run upstairs, slip out of my blazer and trousers and pull on my sweatpants and sweatshirt. Comfortable and shapeless, perfect for cooking, cleaning or doing nothing, they are my house dress.

The Confession App

The Confession App

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I’d thought about another post for today, but then my eyes fell on this headline:
“‘Bless me, Father’
Going to confession? There’s an app for that.”

Apparently there is an new iPhone application that allows for a customizable examination of conscience. Don’t remember your sins? Can’t recall the Third Commandment? No problem. Just whip out your cell phone and it will walk you through the process.

It works like this: You enter your name, age, sex, vocation and date of last confession (I imagine that one is key) and the program takes it from there. The program provides three versions of the Act of Contrition, the prayer you say after receiving the sacrament, including one in Latin. (Venn diagram assignment: Map iPhone users with those who say their prayers in Latin. Hmmm.)

The device also acts as a digital notebook where you can jot down sins as you remember them. Of course, privacy is guaranteed. “Once you go to confession, all that information is wiped out,” said one of the designers.

I think back to my first confession at age seven: my head swimming, clammy palms, the close smell of the confessional, the ominous sliding sound that meant the grate was open and my confession could begin, so nervous I could barely eke out the words, “Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

Perhaps I was born a few decades too soon.

Perpetual Student

Perpetual Student

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Last night I went to a high school “electives fair” and chatted with teachers about psychology, marketing, journalism and more. Celia had visited the fair earlier and emerged with her own favorites (philosophy!). The number of offerings and the sophistication of the classes is further proof that high school is not what it used to be.

My high school electives included orchestra and a semester of typing (the latter a most essential, useful class). I had to wait to college to study philosophy, psychology and journalism. Who’s to say which is the better model.

All I know is that wandering around the cafeteria, picking up class descriptions and reading syllabuses made me want to go back to school — not high school, but college. Nothing jump-starts a brain better than a reading list and a looming final.

A Dream in Winter

A Dream in Winter

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Winter here has been less dramatic than in other parts of the country, but it has still bludgeoned and humbled us. Now in our third month of below-average temperatures, we turn up our collars, we pull on our gloves, we take our own warm bodies, all that we have, onto ice-slicked sidewalks, along frost-heaved roads. We push ourselves through the teens, the twenties, if we’re lucky the thirties.

I know this sounds wimpy to you denizens of the north, to residents of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas — but I want out of winter.

The thing is, persistent cold steels the soul, locks it up tight till springtime. Every year I try to play along. I walk through it and I read and write through it. I cook through it. I work through it. Most of all, though, I dream through it — dream of a sunny deck, the smell of highly chlorinated water on a summer day, a hammock beneath the trees as green leaves wag overhead.

A Classic Dilemma

A Classic Dilemma

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Last weekend I decided to do something special for my blog on its first anniversary, a little facelift, so to speak. Blogspot has new templates so I experimented with some of those on Saturday. I fiddled with background pictures, fonts and shadows; with line rules of varying widths and thicknesses; with navigation bars in everything from chartreuse to puce. Then I became impatient, pushed some buttons I shouldn’t have — and in an instant the old familiar design was gone.

I will admit that a tiny moment of panic ensued. I didn’t want my blog to have an ugly green bar across the top. I wanted those clean spare lines, the thin rules around the title, the subtlety, the white space. I wanted my old blog back.

It took the better part of two hours to return to the “classic” template (Blogspot doesn’t make it easy for you), and once I did I had to re-install all the little extras I’d had there before — using HTML code no less. But I made most of the changes. So the blog that looks almost the same as it used to is actually not the same at all. It is new born.

And I add to the list of benefits A Walker in the Suburbs has brought me yet one more: to be less timid of technology. I’m still a Luddite, just not as much of one.