In the last dream I had this morning, I was playing pickleball with Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Reese Witherspoon. Pete kept bumping into the net, which was somehow both annoying and kind of charming.
I woke with a smile and a sense of calm.
Maybe that's why I was so aware of all the wonders outside this morning--the bright bend of late-winter light, the nervous robins flittering in our crab apple tree, the call of a lone goose looking for its peeps.
Relentless news cycles and bullying buffoons can wear a person down. But, just when I fear my edges are disappearing for good, I find myself redrawn in sunlight and fresh air.
Ten minutes into this morning's walk, I felt my circuits restart. A low thrum ran through me, as real as the traffic on "O". As we strolled the path, Finn found a hundred smells that I could only imagine, and I was happy to just stand there and watch his amazing snout soak it all in. I kept eyeing the trees, hoping to spy a sleeping screech owl wedged perfectly into a carved out knot. It's a bit of an obsession of mine, these days. Just last week, while exploring tree limbs for signs of animal life, I found a large opossum slumped over a high branch, worn out, it seems, from living life as an outlier.
We wandered past a dozen bluejays pestering the squirrels, squirrels chittering at the robins, robins freaking out about who knows what, and who knows what churning up little piles of fresh dirt alongside the sidewalk.
It took us 45 minutes to walk a path that normally can be done in 25. But there was nothing normal about this beautiful morning, bright and new, taut with the news of something else altogether, waiting just around the corner from us.
No comments:
Post a Comment