The trail splits. It bends to the left, arches to the right, and also continues straight. Where next? Choices, choices.
A shrug. A grin.
How about all of them?
We have plenty of time. We find the road, grimace, double back. We pass a playground. The narrow path is bluestone gravel wet in places. We come out by a library. Then we swing around, make the right we previously ignored, and weave our way along the roughest trail of them all. It takes us into the woods. Three white-tail deer stroll through the tangle, browsing on the green remains poking up through the brown. They barely notice our presence and do not leap away when we pass. A single bird calls from a bare branch.
The wild place only lasts so long. Soon, we find ourselves spilling out into a trimmed back yard near a trampoline. We wander along wide streets past broad-shouldered houses up on hilltops. It is silent. One woman walks a dog wearing a muzzle. He looks very hard at us. There are no children. The window boxes are still twinkling with Christmas lights. Wreaths still adorn the oak front doors.
Once, I coveted. The hunger was intense enough that I sucked the marrow from the imagined misery of the inhabitants. Now, I am happy for the faceless and silent neighbors who have found their moment here. I wish them well. It is strange to enter the place where the Schadenfreude used to reside and to see its absence like a shaft of sunlight across a bare wooden floor. I do not need to live in one of those sprawling mansions. I live here, in this skin. I live in this walk. My home is this forever changing scene and these legs carrying me past houses that belong to others who are my community. I inhabit the wide ribbon of road that winds down to a creek and sends me up and over the contours of this place.
It is all gone by. This I know, so it is not so hard to claim this blade of grass, this low branch, as my own. The people at one address or another will grow old. Like me, like you. They will have their moments of laughing so hard the tears come, the clock stops, the earth shudders to a halt along its trajectory around the sun. I wish them more such moments. I hope someone inside right now knows nothing but Yes and spares no thought for me.
Today, a haze blankets the sky. It keeps us warm while making us lose our way. A single airplane rubs its back along the low-slung atmosphere. Conversation sputters. We find two long breaths and the pause makes us nervous. We forget where to turn. It does not matter. We find a way back to where we started.
It is not the same place we left.
It never is. Never. No matter how close we get.
Tag: walking
Happy 100 Days: 28
The crows lift off
from the bare branches,
a wave lifting
a blanket in billows,
throats layering
caw atop caw,
scratching black marks
into mist
on a day not yet begun.
They arc to the left
lost to the next stand of oaks
land, a beat
and a half, feathers edge
against limb and beak, the space between
their calls slow
but never stop. Never still,
they dance
the sky, they cast off
in rows
knit purl knit
wing under and over
wing
somehow they do not tangle
but turn back to alight
on the dry fingertips above
where they began
tightening the circle
of shadow
to a knot
refusing to give way
to the dawn.
Happy 100 Days: 55
“I wish we could fast forward through the whole year,” Bug says. We are in bed and have just finished three books and our first song.
“Yeah? How would that work?”
“We would go all the way through fall, past winter.” He floats his hand through the air above our faces. “And come out after springtime.”
“What for?”
“We could fast forward to a vacation,” he says. “A summer vacation.”
How many of us long for the same thing? I smile and touch his palm suspended up there. “But then you might miss a lot of the good stuff.”
“Like what good stuff?”
“Like all the cool things you get to learn in school,” I say. “How you are just now starting to learn to read. And seeing your friends in class. And playing at recess.” I turn and slip my arm around his middle. “And all the cuddling you’d miss. Think about that.”
“But we could come back all the way around to the beginning,” he explains.
“And do kindergarten all over again?”
“Mmm hmm,” he murmurs. He is fading. “Some kids do it twice.”
I brush my lips over his cheek and begin the next song.
The wind is in from Africa
Last night, I couldn’t sleep. . .
As I walk through the night with the dog over the same quiet neighborhood streets, I notice my mind has retreated again. I have slipped back to the Colorado mountainside or into our Lake George cottage or alongside the San Andreas fault with Bug in my belly. The nostalgia is an open wound. It bites and aches. I miss those trees so much. The dry summer sage. The creek snaking right outside our door. I miss watching Tee drape the house in white twinkle lights as soon as the nights began to lengthen. He would split the logs himself, stack them in the garage and carry up just enough to last through bedtime. Bug always wanted to play with the matches and help bring the fire to life, and Tee always had the patience to let him. I miss walking back through the moonless pitch on those crisp winter evenings towards that glimmering beacon haloed in woodsmoke.
I had no concept of the perfect loveliness of everything right in my hands.
Then I remind my hands to unclench. I whisper to my mind, beckoning it back to me.
You know it sure is hard to leave you, Carey,
but it’s really not my home.
The wound is not real. It is only a series of thoughts. I call myself in from those faraway wilds, giving myself the gentle nudge to attend to this here and now, this quiet stroll through a neighborhood with my lop-eared pooch who stops every 36 inches to snuffle in the leaves.
The time will come when this is the sweetest memory. It might be ten years or it might be tomorrow, but it will come. I will call up this night, the bones of these bare trees, this sleeping boy breathing in the mist and leftover lullabies, and I will ache for the perfect loveliness of this.
Let’s have another round for the bright red devil
Who keeps me in this tourist town
There is no rush and nothing to be gained from hurtling past the winter and right out the other end of spring. Do-overs are not allowed in this game. Getting to the promised land faster means you have only failed to inhabit your footsteps as you are taking them. As ill-fitting, bothersome, and wrong as this chapter may be, this right here is the story of you being written.
But let’s not talk about fare-the-wells now,
The night is a starry dome
And they’re playing that scratchy rock and roll
Beneath the mantle of the moon.
The end of this act is already coming. Whether you recognize it or not, whether you hurtle yourself towards it or fight it every step of the way, you are already on your way to the next unrecognizable incarnation. Someday soon, this will be the hard candy you suck until your teeth hurt. This will be the nugget you cannot spit out. You might as well pause long enough now to place your lips on whatever is here before you. Foul, sweet, and anything in between. It does not matter. It is yours. Take a good, long taste.
I say, oh, you’re a mean old daddy,
but I like you.
—
Thanks and apologies to Joni Mitchell for “Carey” from the glimmering winter night of an album, Blue.
Happy 100 Days: 63
A hawk lifts off from a branch when we pass under. It is the same one we saw in the spring from the balcony. It was a distant visitor then, its tail a crimson haze. We named it Cesar.
The rain pelts our coats. Looking up to find the place where the bird has landed sends water snaking down our jaws to pool in the necks of our hoods. The hawk’s tiny eyes look down, taking the measure of us (two gangling primates and one lop-eared wolf). We cannot pose much threat, our boots slipping on the path’s wet skin of leaves. Still, the raptor lifts its wings and rises again, beating against the fierce wind to find the elevation where it can see but not be seen.
Here, under the sagging autumn canopy, we are silent. The power to name is no longer ours.
Blocked by debris, the creek has cut a new channel. White water surges alongside the roots of the oaks. It makes its escape downstream, forming an island. The emerald heads of mallards reflect the last of the light. Their white necks trace busy figures against the roiling pond. The small flock bobs in dizzying circles, rivulets of wet streaming along their feathers and back to the source.
Around the bend, the blue heron stands knee-deep in churning white right at the funnel where the waterfall begins. He glances our way. Not until the pooch veers towards the creek do the wings shudder to life. Gunmetal feathers unfurl, grab air, and haul the body up. The heron barely bothers to tuck its spindled legs under its belly. It skims the surface, tarnished bronze feet almost flicking into the water. It alights in a quieter eddy upstream on the opposite bank. It turns its head away from us, the cutlass of its beak rending the wind.
Happy 100 Days: 96
Out there in the dark, the night creatures sing. The dog and I walk through them, deaf at first. The chatter in my head talks itself hoarse during the first mile. Finally, at the top of the hill where we turn back towards home, the soliloquy decides to pause for a sip of something cool. I take a breath of September sky. At last, I can hear song.
The music starts with a churning of chirps. Then, an aquatic bass groans, rising slowly at first, sweeping up to its white crest and then crashing. Into that half-beat of rest, the faint piccolo of some distant insect twitters into the fringes of the composition. High up lyrics in the trees thrum against a low insistent rhythm. Some of these things sound finned, some winged. Some may only be visitors here. Some are most certainly in heat.
I walk and walk, the noise echoing against my skin. I walk right through the plush center of memory, returning to the deep blue-black of his sheets where we spread ourselves on our backs next to each other. It was the end of summer. The sliding door was flung wide, opening out onto the balcony and the woods beyond. We held hands and gazed blind into the dark, listening.
With our torn net of words, we tried to capture the sweeping shape of the calls out there. Low, elastic frog calls, intermittent and long. A high whine, a chirrup-chirrup. We listened together, whispering our discoveries. We collected five varieties of song, teasing out the threads, each of us hearing an altogether new strain that the other had discerned first. Finally, finally, we stopped forcing names on impossible things. We lay together sharing nothing but one song as it changed without our consent into something different. We let go without letting go. We no longer remembered to count. At some point before morning, that fleeting chorus lulled us to sleep.
I remember nothing of this.
I remember everything.
Tonight, the thunder rolls in. The dog and I make it home before the rain begins.
Giving Way
The storm blows
trees across lines
and we all come out to see
neighbors we have not met
in thirteen years
calling to us from across the way,
“Hello, hello, do you have power?
Do you have any damage?”
It is hot for days.
The dog and I clamber
over fallen beeches
to walk the trail
winding along a stream
as we do every week.
A stranger in soiled wellies with his panting
labrador pauses to ask
about the contents of our fridge
and the integrity of our roof
before apologizing
for all the mud. “The path to the pond
is pretty rough with all the trees down.”
The pond?
He and the hound bid us farewell
and I see a trail
I have never met
in thirteen years
bending off through the shattered woods.
It takes me two months to find
time, it is September
before we follow the thin ribbon
of roots and earth
to a place where lily pads blanket the surface
and tiny frogs whing away from the splashing
advance of my dog through mud
swallowing her up to her chest. She dips
her head again
and again to drink
living water
all of a sudden
right here.
Fight or Flight
Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.
Be like the forces of nature:
when it blows, there is only wind;
when it rains, there is only rain;
when the clouds pass, the sun shines through.
– Tao Te Ching, 10
We are dressed for the day. A Tupperware of cinnamon toast and eggs is ready for Bug to scarf down on the commute. The only thing left is walking the dog. I offer Bug the choice to stay in the house with granddaddy or come with me. He fiddles with his legos, weighing his options. Usually the dog’s constitutional is an all-business trot down the cul-de-sac. Ten minutes, tops. While I know better than to take the kid when we are in a hurry, the situation calls for adaptation.
“Gramma Genie can walk her,” he tells me.
“Gramma Genie is in Dallas, remember? Your great grandma Mardy fell and broke her hip.”
“Oh yeah,” he remembers. “What did they have to do for the operation?”
Many mornings, Bug will hang around my mother’s room chewing the fat as she gussies herself up for her workday. My father sequesters himself in the basement to write. In the blessed reprieve, I can buzz around packing lunches and walking the dog, half hearing that mode of relentless interrogation only a 5-year-old can pull off. This week, the big bedroom upstairs is quiet. Bug tags along after me instead. Great Grandma Mardy needs my mother right now much more than we do, so I attempt to move along at a steady clip while also keeping expectations down where they belong. Bug’s ceaseless chatter accompanies me. I explain as briefly as I can how hip replacement works and what the word “rehabilitation” means. I remind him he is supposed to be choosing between the dog and granddaddy.
Bug glances at the wan light coming from a too-quiet basement. The old man is no match for the outdoors. “I want to walk with you,” he tells me.
Racing down the driveway, Bug kicks through a puddle. It has rained torrents every night for the better part of a week. Giant mushrooms bloom low in the grass and a creek the length of the block has formed along the edge of the blacktop. Fenway snuffles, squashing tiny wild strawberries as she goes. The scent of honeysuckle drapes itself over the mist.
Ahead, Bug sees Cleo dart into a gauze of brambles. Our skinny calico cat often joins us on these jaunts, keeping her haughty distance. In an instant, she is invisible, her patches blending into the spongy decay of last season’s canopy. Bug turns to me, impulse flashing across his face.
“Let’s go on an adventure!”
I feel a sigh gather steam but I quell it. It is getting late. The dog roots around in the puddles. She has peed so we are done here. “It’s awfully wet, baby,” I say, “and we need to get to school.”
“It’s not too wet,” he says. He steps off the blacktop and his feet sink into the muck. I groan. He shrugs. “It’s okay. It’s only a little wet.”
The cat is visible for a moment, stalking her imaginary prey. She creeps further into the shadows. Bug watches her, keeping one eye on me. He is primed. “We have to chase her,” he explains.
“We’ve already gotten all dressed for school. I’m wearing my work clothes.”
“We can change our socks. You will dry off at work.” He grins at me, momentum quivering from toes to scalp. His gaze twinkles with something like. . . flirtation? I’m a sucker for a charmer. No and Yes start throwing punches. The crowd presses in, choosing sides. The determination to distinguish myself in my profession joins the clock in clanging out support for the clear favorite.
The underdog’s backers are silent.
Open yourself to the Tao,
then trust your natural responses;
and everything will fall into place.
Sometimes the hardest steps are the simplest to take. The playground scuffle goes on, but I tear myself away and look only at my son splashed across the canvas of the morning. How many of us get to kick off the workday by ducking into the wild woods? My grandma in that post-op hospital room would probably surrender her reserve seat in heaven for one last moment exactly like this.
“Let’s go get that kitty,” I say. I unclip the dog’s lead. Bug chants “Yay, yay, yay!” as he ducks under the vines and plunges into shadow. We are deep in when a breeze awakens the leaves and showers us with a morning-after rain. We look up through the blue-green awning at the sun making its way through a weave of branch and cloud. Bug and Fenway follow the incensed cat down into a creek-bed and up onto a soggy log. She leaps away and we part a congregation of weeds whispering at our calves.
Our ragtag foursome dips and climbs through summer then winter and even next year’s spring. We burrow through the earth’s core and emerge from the mouth of a cave that smells of seawater and smoke. We wander through a valley teeming with cockatiels that screech from the low branches of mango trees. Every person we have ever known has grown old and died. A waterfall as tall as a mountain washes us free of memory.
Bug parts a curtain of ivy and we spill out onto the road. The cat bounds back towards the house, her tail arched in irritation. My son’s face is wild with pink light and his legs are streaked with mud. “We came out all the way down here!” We have exited fewer than twenty feet from our entry point, but I share his wonder. The continent has shifted in our absence, and nothing will ever be the same.
We dash back to our house and peel off socks and shoes. I take the stairs two at a time to change the whole outfit because three inches of damp trouser cuff might blow my cover. I may be a feral thing, but I still have to don my breathing apparatus to survive in the world of steel and glass.
No one knows where we have been. How could we begin to explain? We slipped through a tear in the damp fabric of the morning and crawled onto the beach alongside those first gilled beasts. Only a skittish cat, one lop-eared dog, a boy and his mama recall what happened here, but our recollection is fading fast. In the car, Bug and I speak of quotidian things, of weekend plans and hip surgery. When we attempt to fit what we have witnessed into the shape of language, our tongues founder.
I know only this: When all the clocks in the world demanded we stay on solid ground, we stepped off the edge. We made our way back, but we may not stay for long. Do we have years or decades? Will we will reach ninety-two or knock off next week? No one gets out of here unscathed. For every moment we claim as our own, we will pay. It is only a matter of time.
If you open yourself to loss,
you are at one with loss
and you can accept it completely.
Walk the dog or stay home? Get wet or stay dry? Everything we love, even the very selves we occupy, might be gone in a blink. Knowing this, what choice do we have but to step over and meet what is here?
—
Mitchell, Stephen. Tao Te Ching. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
Shannon E. Williams 