With Dignity
This morning’s walk was more of a lumber as I coaxed my bones and their companion muscles to make the seventeen-acre lap around the field and back to the woods. A week’s worth of more physical activity than I’m used to landed me in the mosey mode as I turned the corner down the path to the west and stepped over frozen deer tracks and mole tunnel speed bumps (I try to look up and around when I walk but find I’m more about minding my steps one at a time, head bowed as if reverently contemplating where my foot lands next. I wish I was that mindful but it’s more about avoiding a hard face plant on that frozen ground).
Rounding another turn on the path that runs along the western edge of the field, a young doe and I startled each other and she leapt over the bordering thicket into the neighbor’s sleeping cornfield, disappearing into whatever magical ether protects the wild things in their encounters with us two-leggeds. Peering through the gaps in the tree line, I saw no sign of her and got to musing if she had even existed at all. When you start your walks before the sun’s full face has even crested the other neighbor’s 80 acres of spent soybean stubble, it’s easy to give your imagination free reign over your senses. I trudged up the steep slope we still call “The Hill” and felt my heart settle into non-climbing rhythm as the path flattened out between the woodsy jumble of slender sycamore saplings reaching across the sky to shake hands or do their best arboreal impression of DaVinci’s “The Creation of Man” over my still-bowed head. In full summer, it’s a cathedral ceiling that has me bent-necked and enchanted as I trust my feet to stumble me forward across the exposed tree roots. I’d trade a skinned knee for that view any day of the week.
I don’t check the weather app most days before I walk. I just open the front door, inhale whatever the air is giving and arbitrarily count to six before hazarding a guess at the current temperature. I layer up accordingly, topping off the whole mismatched ensemble with a snug knitted head wrap sporting a large unicorn face on each of the ear flaps. It’s thick and muffles most sound (blessedly, the morning rush hour traffic a mile away and, regrettably, most woodpeckers’ persistent tapping and the sweet trill of an early-rising Carolina wren). A steady wind had been blowing all night and continued its blustery dance, gusting now and then, picking up speed as I followed the curve of the path away from the western edge of the property line and headed northeast. Five, maybe seven yards forward and I heard it: a stilted cry of an animal injured or trapped, just on the other side of a thorny thicket patch. It faded and then repeated, stronger this time and mournful. I stepped off the path and followed the sound upward, wondering what kind of help I’d be if something was hurt and hiding way up in those blue beech that offered no lower branches to get a leg up. Pulling off the headwrap, I heard a stiff creaking sound and realized it was the wind pushing the branches of a black walnut stand into each other, the slender cold wood of their leafless fingers rubbing together in the cold. I stood still, listening as they groaned like I do when I get up off the couch after sitting for more than an hour and thought I get it, sister. It was at once eerie and reassuring, to find kinship among such sentient beings who spend their winters taking it on the chin, whatever comes, and still have the grace and dignity to sprout leaves and keep us cool in the hot weeks of July. Will I ever come back from a walk without lessons in my hands? Oh, I hope not…
Last Thursday night I took my 6-month-old hearing aids to a live performance of the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine and soaked up each note, each thundering boom from the timpani player’s well-aimed mallets. I adjusted the volume up and left it there, no regrets for the full body symphonic experience. Pre-hearing aid existence, I doubt I would have wondered what I was missing and, in some settings (rock concerts, movie theaters where the sound tech has the speakers on full blast), I’d even put in earplugs to soften the audio assault. But when getting older gives you the gift of volume control through an appliance so small it’s nearly undetectable, it’s fun to experiment with the variances in sound. Thank you, reader, for tolerating that “step out of the woods for a moment” tangent. It’s connected somehow.
As I collect more morning walks (moseys, lumbers, stumbles, whatever…) and add them to a growing cache of Life’s Memorable Moments, there’s a promise I make to a few select trees I stop and visit in the woods. I don’t know how I picked these particular ones out of a forest of thousands, but we do meet up most mornings and I breathe my thanks into their grooved or smoothed bark (black walnut or ash, respectively), telling them “as often as I can, for as long as I can”, and walk on knowing that we both understand what that means. Tomorrow isn’t anyone’s guarantee (certainly not mine) and too often I’ve chosen a warm bed over wind-chilled cheeks and fingers, regretting it instantly and always. But with that promise, there’s an elastic amnesty that allows for the unexpected, without judgment or guilt. And I’ll cherish, revel in and be enchanted by whatever the land shows me on a given day. She is beautiful always, come hail or mud or crocuses peeking out defiantly through the snow. She’s older, I’m older and we’re both dealing with it.
Sometimes, you’ve gotta slow the walk down to a measured mosey to see what matters most.
