Holmes Sweet Home

I love my walks at Holmes Lake.  Like a visit to the East Campus Dairy Store, they rarely disappoint.  Yet, I almost never walk around the whole lake.  Instead, my typical path looks like this:  Head up the dam, cross the bridge, follow a dirt path towards the planetarium, and bend my way back towards the bridge and dam.

How does a place that is so familiar to me keep me coming back, especially if I turn around, halfway through my walk, and retrace my path?  Where's the fun in that?

Here's the thing, though.  When I leave the upper meadow and head back to the bridge, that path is the only thing that hasn't changed.  Now, my eyes and nose are drawn to the voluptuous milkweed plants, their bossomy blooms having never looked--or smelled--better.  Above them, an eastern kingbird chitters wildly in its mid-sky battle with a grackle.

With the yawning sun behind me now, I watch the dam and grasses explode in deep, dark greens while my shadow--stretched long and low--falls across the front page of the local author's newspaper, as she sits at her kitchen table and plans out her day.   Or so I tell myself.

Walking past the low dip of land just east of the dam, the brilliant purple flowers of a native tall thistle catch my eye, and I stand there, gape-jawed, taking them in.  I decide to go off path to take a closer look, although Finn's attention is on a tiny vole as it dashes madly through the grass to safety.  Amazingly, while I can't see the vole, I can follow the jagged line of its escape path by watching small blades of grass bend under its weight.

Atop the dam again, this time I'm blinded by the sunlight, now flooding my view ahead.  Gone are the vultures that, 30 minutes ago, had gathered on the beach below.   Now, a mama mallard and her teenaged kids head away from the shore, while a fisherman casts his line just beyond its mossy edges.

Nearly an hour into my walk, there are more people, and more mosquitos.  Less appealing company, perhaps, but still different, despite being on the same path.

Maybe that's the real pleasure for me, then--the fact that there are new things to discover even when the way might seem old.   Always, by the time we take the slow path off the dam, I feel a connectedness that wasn't there an hour ago.  My senses are heightened, my heart rate slow and easy.  And I care not a whit that my path has been in the shape of a new moon rather than a circle, because it is always revealing something new to me.