This Early Spring

There is nothing either lion-like or lamb-like about the way the month of March is leaving us this year. Instead, it's going out like a nasty poltergeist with a decided mean streak: wind storms, thunder storms, tornadoes, floods. March is saying to us: screw you for complaining about the persistent cold, the lingering snow pack. In my part of the world, the water table is unusually high, and troublesome like that. (The neighbors' sump pumps have not stopped running for weeks.) Troublesome, and also oracular: it is how I discovered a few days ago that I have a collapsed septic pipe in the side yard.

There's water everywhere, and the river that goes through our valley seems especially ambitious these days, branching itself out in all sorts of new directions. If I walk south about a mile from my house, there's a spot where the river veers right up toward the road, with an old asphalt bridge crossing it along a side path. This morning as I walked I saw that it had crested over its banks there, yards were flooded, someone's swing set submerged up to its cross bars. I had walked to that spot because I wanted to take a picture of it for a friend. I hoped that in the early morning light the river would look inviting and artistic, fresh. This time of year the light is hard, though, and flat, and when I got home I didn't like the photographs I'd taken. They all look as though they were shot through a brown filter, brown water, bare brown trees, brown spit of land struggling to stay aloft in the middle of the river bed. The water itself looks bloated and not at all like something you'd want to jump into. It was not a great day for a picture outing, nor for imagining a swim, but it was still a good morning for a walk.

I've been a walker all of my life, though for different reasons at different stages of it: when I was younger I walked because I could not drive, later I walked because for many years I drove but did not own a car, I walked because I had a dog who needed to walk, too, I walked for the exercise. When my first child was born I walked because there was little else to do in those early isolated months of her infancy. It was on those walks that I discovered what I think is supposed to be its real purpose in my life, and now I walk because that is when I do much of my work. Ideas come then, or pretty soon after. I'm hardly the first writer to have noticed this. What I have noticed most is how reliable a technique it is because something always emerges. It is like having a little treasure box that you can open time and time again, and each time, there's something new in there, no matter how much you take out all you have to do is close the lid and open it again and boom, there's the next thing. If I could wish for one magical ability it would be shapeshifting but if I could wish for one magical tool it would be that box. I am fully aware of how remarkable it is to be already in possession of that very instrument. This should be a fairy tale or a children's book; maybe I will write it. Maybe that was the thing the box offered up for today. Or maybe this is, these few paragraphs I'm writing now. Is it enough? It is.

Most days I like to walk alone because it's easier to let my thoughts have their way with me when I don't have the responsibility of being a human being because I am in the company of another human being. Today, though, I would have liked to have had a companion, someone to walk beside me down the wide road and talk about--I don't know what we would talk about, it has been a long time since I've taken a walk with anyone other than myself and the dog. I have been thinking about it a lot over the past few days, though, thinking about how much time I spend alone now and how finally, I am beginning to think I wish that would change. I imagine I must be remarkably close to becoming Crazy Cat Lady and decide, all other things being equal, that CCL ought to be Plan B or even Plan C but definitely, not the default.

Rather, a Plan A like this one: someone to walk down to the river with, and sit beside on the rocks in the hot spring sun, and maybe if we could find enough to talk about for long enough the sun would shift in the sky, and the flat light and the brown landscape together might turn out to be not half bad, considered over a little time, in company. It would be better to lead someone down there and say to them, I want you to see this the way you see it rather than the way I see it or the camera tells it, and you can let me better know what you think. That little image of mine is, after all, only a sorry sentence or two out of the whole, much bigger and much more interesting when it's not just mine, story.