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.
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.
Heading outside on a beautiful Autumn morning to gather my thoughts and develop a work strategy for the day, I encountered a squirrel in the yard.
I had a list in hand.
The squirrel had a walnut.
At first glance, I appeared to be the better organized of the two. My intentions were written down in a reasonably orderly fashion, with little boxes waiting to be checked.
The squirrel had no notebook, no calendar, and nowhere obvious to keep a pencil.
Nevertheless, he was making considerably more progress it seemed.
I watched him cross the grass with his walnut, stop beside a tree, and look around.
Then he changed direction.
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.
The other day I came across a simple thought that stayed with me much longer than I expected.
It wasn’t complicated. In fact, it centered around one of the smallest marks in our written language — a tiny little dash.
You know the one. The little dash between the dates.
Every life can eventually be described by two dates. One marks the day we entered the world. The other, someday, marks the day our earthly story is complete.
Between those two dates is a simple little dash.
But when one thinks about it, that tiny dash mark somehow has to represent an entire lifetime.
Not just the years . . . . the life. The living in between the dates.
And that got me thinking.
Perhaps the most important part isn’t the dates at all.
Perhaps it has always been the life between them.
Thanks for stopping by to visit. I was thinking about something the other day . . . .
When I was about six or seven years old, our next-door neighbors invited me to spend the weekend with them on a little farm they owned near Florida, Missouri.
It wasn’t a working farm in the sense I imagined farms to be. Someone else did the farming, and they simply shared the harvest. And by city-boy standards, it was primitive, like a trip back to the wild west of my imagination.
A well for water and no indoor plumbing. There was a chamber pot for doing necessary overnight business behind a pulled back curtain in what used to be a closet because outside there could be roaming bobcats, coyotes, and foxes. They didn’t mention bears and wolves, but my imagination soon caught up to include them, too.
But for me, though, and how it all turned out, it all might as well have been Yellowstone National Park.
I had no idea one ordinary summer Saturday was about to introduce me to a whole new world and life
