Some mornings, you can wear yourself out before you ever put your shoes on.
There is the news. There is the thing somebody said about the news. There is somebody else explaining why the first somebody has everything backward. Meanwhile, your tea is getting cold, and you have been holding the same sock for five minutes.
On mornings like that, I find it helps to open the door.
A black cat does not know it is supposed to be mysterious.
It knows where the afternoon sunshine falls across the floor.
A black cat does not know it is supposed to be unlucky.
It knows the sound of a familiar voice, the whereabouts of a favorite toy, and which chair someone was foolish enough to leave unattended.
And somewhere beneath that dark little coat is a creature with ordinary wishes.
A warm place.
A gentle hand.
Fresh water and a good meal.
Someone kind to curl up beside.
With Halloween approaching, black cats are appearing on decorations, greeting cards, and front windows again. There they are beside the pumpkins, backs arched, tails curled, looking as though they have been placed in charge of something suspicious and ready to pounce.
Perhaps we ought to give them a different assignment this year.
Being loved would be a good one.
When I had my little Chihuahua Allie, there was a walk I particularly enjoyed.
It took us up the main street, past a long row of honeysuckle bushes bordering the sidewalk at a corner house, then around onto Clay Avenue.
It was a perfectly ordinary route.
Which is to say, there was usually something worth seeing.
A Black Walnut tree stood at the corner property. In late Summer and Autumn, its green-husked walnuts lay scattered across the ground. Some had already received considerable attention from squirrels and other neighbors whose dining arrangements were less formal than ours.
I liked looking at what they had left behind.
Someone had been busy.
Allie and I were merely passing through the workplace.
In Spring, the honeysuckle gave us another reason to go that way.
Its fragrance reached the sidewalk before we had finished approaching it. The bushes continued around the corner, and farther along came a row of lilacs with a lovely fragrance of their own.
There were days when that corner deserved a longer visit than the schedule had allowed.
Fortunately, a dog understands that a walk may contain several appointments nobody wrote down.
Farther up Clay were beautiful two-story homes, with carefully tended landscaping and decorations that changed with the holidays. Somebody had taken time choosing what to plant, what to set beside a doorway, and how to welcome the season.
I enjoyed seeing what was different.
In Autumn, I watched the ground for leaves.
Maple. Sweetgum. Pin Oak. Sycamore.
Different shapes, different colors, different ways of catching my attention.
A particularly beautiful leaf might come home for a friend’s collection. Pine cones went to another friend.
That gave the walk a pleasant little extension. Something noticed along the sidewalk became something to share after I got home.
“I thought you might like this.”
A small thing to say, holding a leaf.
A good thing to have a reason to say.
Of course, those sidewalks required attention in the practical sense, too. Walnuts can roll beneath a foot. Wet leaves can be slippery. A twig in the wrong place needs stepping around.
I would never suggest that enjoying the scenery means ignoring where we are putting our feet.
But there was room along that walk for both kinds of attention.
I could watch my step and still admire the tree.
Sometimes I think hurry takes more from us than we realize.
We know where we are going. We have worked out how long it should take. Everything between here and there becomes something to get past.
The familiar places are especially easy to overlook.
We have seen that house.
We know that corner.
We walked beneath that tree yesterday.
Yet yesterday’s tree may have had considerably more green in it. Someone may have put pumpkins beside the steps this morning. A neighbor we usually wave to may have time for a conversation today.
Familiarity can persuade us there is nothing left to discover.
Autumn is very good at proving otherwise.
Its changes arrive a few leaves at a time, then suddenly seem to have happened all at once. We remark that the season went quickly, and perhaps it did.
Perhaps we were also occupied elsewhere.
I understand being occupied. There are errands, appointments, unfinished jobs, and things that cannot wait simply because a maple has decided to be magnificent.
Still, I would like to make a little room for the maple.
Taking the long way home need not mean adding distance.
For those of us whose walking has become more limited, that matters. A few extra minutes on a bench may do it. A pause beside a window. A little longer looking across the yard before going inside.
We can give a familiar place another look from wherever we happen to be.
And we can do the same for the people in it.
Stop long enough to hear the answer after asking how someone is doing. Notice the flowers a neighbor has been tending. Remember who would enjoy a pine cone or a particularly fine leaf.
There is a kind of companionship in paying attention. We begin carrying little reminders of one another as we go about the day.
I think back fondly on those walks with Allie.
The honeysuckle and lilacs belong to Spring in my memory. The green walnuts and gathered leaves belong to the turning year. The houses along Clay had something to offer in every season.
We went out for a walk.
Often, I came home with something I wanted someone else to see.
That seems a fine return for taking a little longer.
Till next time then —
I once took the long way home because I thought I remembered a blackberry patch.
I remembered correctly.
Getting home took somewhat longer after that.
Images have been created for this piece with the assistance of AI . . . lovingly prepared and styled for Honey Hill Country and the world of Little Red Bear.
Welcome back to the Front Porch, friends.
Have you ever noticed how much faster time seems to move as we get older?
When I was a boy, waiting for Christmas seemed to take approximately three years. Summer vacation seemed to last forever. Until we got to the middle of August and started back-to-school shopping and reality set in, of course. Birthdays took their sweet time getting around to us. And school days could occasionally demonstrate an impressive ability to stop the clock altogether.
Now?
January arrives, I turn around twice, and somebody is talking about Labor Day.
Same clocks. Same sixty minutes in an hour. Same twenty-four hours in a day.
So what happened?
Let’s talk about that. Because maybe the clock isn’t the only thing that determines how long a day feels.
Welcome back to the Front Porch.
You have probably heard the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
I’ve been thinking lately that sometimes a picture does something else. More than that.
Sometimes it tells you where to find the words.
That thought came back to me recently while working on something you may never think much about when looking at a finished illustration . . . . Just what should a steam locomotive arriving at a small Ozarks town in 1904 actually look like?
Seems like a simple enough question, doesn’t it?
Put a locomotive on some railroad tracks, add a station, maybe a few people standing around, and there you go. Well — apparently — that isn’t how things work around here.
Because once I started looking more closely at the trains that would have traveled through Honey Hill Country at the beginning of the twentieth century, one question led to another. And another. And another . . . . And then another.
Before long, I was looking into steam locomotives and passenger cars, freight cars and railroad crossings, station platforms and loading areas, horse-drawn wagons and mule teams, and the wooden water tanks that stood alongside railroad tracks all across the country.
All of this, mind you, because I wanted to create a true-to-the-period image of a train.
Funny thing is, I had been down this road before — although the first time, there wasn’t a train anywhere in sight.
There are certain things that simply belong to summer.
Fresh tomatoes still warm from the garden.
Homemade ice cream.
The happy sounds of children splashing in the water.
The crack of a bat at a baseball game.
Sweet tea and watermelon on a hot afternoon.
The smell of freshly cut hay.
Honeysuckle drifting on the evening breeze.
Backyard barbecues.
The distant hum of a lawn mower somewhere down the road.
And, if you ask me . . . .
Butterflies and fireflies.
