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Sunday, August 17, 2003

Evening Walk

Music: None; the kids are watching an execrable movie (Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure,, which is a movie I despise because it's stupid, but I can't think of any rational objection to it other than that so they get to watch it occasionally)


Mood: Exultant

I just finished my evening walk. It was a GOOD one. I walked hard and fast for 40 minutes; I went the gentlest way down the hill and the way with the most harsh uphills on the way back to really get my heart rate pumping. And even so I could really enjoy it on a purely aesthetic level too. I love the smells I catch along the way (I am a very scent-oriented person; under certain circumstances, some smells can bring nostalgic tears to my eyes, isn't that sappy?). This is a very small town, and you're never far from "nature"; the residential street I like best runs right along the edge of town, and you can smell the tarweed and the trees really strongly. Someone's lawn sprinkler had gone past the edge of their lawn, and hit the tarweed in the field beside it, so it smelled like summer rain. As I walked along I could smell showery smells through someone's window, the remnant of a barbecue, and then (mmm) the wonderful muddy, minty, blackberryish smell of the creek. I lived alongside that creek for a total of about 8 of my growing-up years, so that smell is a biggie on my nostalgia list. My mom used to pick blackberries along it by the bushel in the summertime, and sell them to make a little extra money.



The town where I live is a historic one, and you can buy "listening tours" which you are supposed to put in your tape deck while you drive around town looking at the historically significant sites -- places like the courthouse, newspaper office, old houses, who knows what. I have my own personal memories of all these places, having lived here for 28 years (ie, my whole life). For instance, just after I walk down a really steep hill from my house, I pass a hotel where you can always hear people in the pool in the summer. One summer, my few friends and I spent a week or two going from hotel to hotel in town, swimming in the pools until someone caught on that we weren't guests and kicked us out. At that place, I don't know how they did it but they caught on to us in like four minutes. We'd barely gotten wet. Walking along further, I came to Mr. E's house -- he was a teacher at the elementary school for years, and I went to church with his family. His house is this lovely big boxy two-story at the edge of town. It has been sad the last few years -- he went from having a houseful of people to being all alone; his daughters (whom I remember as infants, and I know I'm not old, but it is weird to have that happen) went off to college and their own lives, and his wife died. Now he is a bona fide old man, and he never even seemed close to that until so recently.



Then I walked by the new library, the building of which was an epoch in our life. :) They were working on it the summer when LT was just 4 and C was not quite 1. We used to walk down there with C in the backpack, and bring a picnic, and sit on the lawn of the courthouse in the shade to watch the construction equipment at work. LT never wanted to leave. And of course there's the courthouse itself. One summer when I was maybe 11, my brother and I were bored at home (miles from anywhere), and we would come into town with our mother each day. To fill in the time, we would go to the courthouse and watch the hearings and trials and such. It was very informative, and fascinating.

Then I passed the high school, and I swear I could smell the auditorium smell (heaven) all the way down by the road. Next to the high school is the elementary school. It is strange that two places with so many horrible memories can also have some very pleasant associations. It is an odd contradiction, and frequently I try to deny that I have any good memories from those places at all, even to myself. Although really, the vast bulk of the bad memories are from elementary school and junior high -- high school kind of pales in comparison on the misery scale -- and the vast bulk of the good memories are from high school, not that it was all fun and games socially either, but it was a big improvement. So I suppose it makes more sense than I'd thought. Anyway.

Down the hill, I went past the place where someone has a spring in the lower part of their yard; there's a sort of concrete retaining wall at one end of it, and a life preserver on it, and an ancient sign that says, "WATCH YOUR CHILDREN". I used to think that the little pond there was intended as a place to swim, and used to beg my parents to let us swim there. It was years before I caught on that all that was there just as a precaution in case someone fell in. It smells cool there, and feels cool, like it always has, and the dirt sidewalk is carpeted with alyssum along the edges in springtime, humming with bees.


And there's the cinderblock retaining wall that we used to walk on when I was little. There's someone's lawn on one side, and a drop to the dirt pathway on the other. When you're six and you're walking on top holding Daddy's hand, it's a perilous height; in actuality the tallest part barely reaches my shoulder. The first time I held my son's hand as he walked up there I felt a jarring sense of rightness -- with all its faults, it seemed so natural and good that I would be bringing up my children in this same place, having their young eyes taking in the same things mine did at their age.


I could go on and on (I haven't even gotten to downtown) but I'll stop. It is so nice to have a diary, and to get this stuff all out in a way that, realistically, nobody will probably ever read, so I won't be awfully embarrassed about my sappiness or feel like I have to hold a lot back, but there's always the possibility that someone will read it, which makes it worth typing out to begin with.

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