Elisabeth’s walking challenge has been surprisingly challenging for me this month. So far, out of 25 days, I’ve only managed to take a walk on 15 of those. (I plan to take a walk today, but it’s early yet.) I’ve spent a lot of time berating myself: how hard is it to take a ten-minute walk? Especially when you have access to a) a very walkable neighborhood and b) beautiful walking paths and c) A TREADMILL. Comparison is the thief of joy and all that, but I feel like an utter failure compared to someone like Engie, who has a full-time job and still manages to walk multiple times a day. Perhaps I need a dog.
This week has been much better. (And I did walk on Wednesday, with two friends and a dog. I have a clear memory of programming “outdoor walk” into my watch, but seem to have done something to prevent it from recording.)
The weather – which has been beautiful beyond belief – makes me want to be outside all the time. It’s been the best of all seasons here: warm and sunny, but not humid, and flowers are still blooming, but also the trees are a panoply of vivid colors. Mornings and evenings are cool enough for a jacket, the days are warm enough for tank tops and even shorts.
I keep goggling at the leaves, trying repeatedly to capture their vibrancy with my phone, and failing. It’s a beauty I’m unable to adequately translate to digital imagery. Every time I’m outside, I’m drinking in the colors, trying to store them up for winter’s bleak monochrome.
I keep pointing out trees to my daughter on our drives – “Look! Look!” – and she has been humoring me, and pointing out especially beautiful specimens herself. The other day, my husband picked her up from school, and apparently wanted to stop to photograph some startlingly red trees on the drive home, and my daughter moaned, “You sound like Mom!”
Carla has been “hired” a few times to puppy-sit for one of our neighbors. It’s now dark when she goes to do his bedtime routine, so I’ve been accompanying her. (I don’t go into their house at all; that would be weird. I just lurk outside in the dark, looking at my phone, which is much less weird.) She and I take the puppy on a final evening walk, both of us inhaling deeply of the night air, tinted with the promise of winter, both of us gazing up at the stars. Carla tries to get the puppy to admire the moon; so far, he is unimpressed.
My husband, not usually one for walks, has initiated two! walks! this week alone! Fall is his favorite season and I wish it would last forever just for the opportunity to trudge through the fallen leaves with him, hand in hand, talking about all sorts of the mundane things you discuss with your partner.
One of my favorite things about fall is stepping on acorns. The crunch under my heel is so satisfying. I am a little reluctant to do so when I’m walking with others, though – there’s something a little childish, a little embarrassing about doing so among friends. Perhaps that’s why there’s so much joy in it, because it feels like a call back to childhood? Another thing I love about fall is the cloud cover. It’s not oppressive, as in winter. It’s joyful and painterly and somehow distinct from the sky in other seasons.
I have been obsessed with a bank of trees I walk by frequently. It’s a copse of ALL the colors, their brightness cranked up to 11. We had a windy day the other day, and they are beginning to release their leaves to the inevitability of time’s passing, and I’m trying not to see it as a loss, but as a harbinger of the austere beauty to come: snow and ice and bare limbs scraping a cloud smudged sky.
