Starlit Winter Nights

Were Made for Walking

While we're in the old neighborhood walking (see the previous post), let's take a left down this street. And go back about 15 years.

I worked in the newsroom of our local paper for over two decades. That meant going in later than most nine-to-fivers (which really means 8-to-5. Don't know where the nine came from.) and coming home late.

Newspaper work is often a response to the daily fire, figuratively speaking.

News happens in a haphazard fashion and the caffeine kicks in when the adrenaline fails. When the work is done; when editors are pleased enough with it to release the troops; reporters, photographers, graphics folks and whoever else had a hand the next day's stories, find the exit.

I used to get home still keyed up from it all and would go for a hike around the 'hood to work the edge off.

In the winter the sun sets around five-thirty or so November through February, so the streets would be dark for the walks of those months. Tallahassee rarely got cold enough to prevent a walk for me. I'd just put on a jacket of suitable thickness and take my coffee buzz to the streets.

The neighborhood was designed in the early 1950s, with large wooded lots and small houses tucked behind walls of azalea bushes. There were few straight-line streets. Most roadways curved in gentle arcs and coursed up and down the hills.

I would walk from one pool of streetlamp light to another. Eventually the newsroom would fade from my thoughts and I would begin to notice the play of lights and shadows among the trees and ground surfaces. Someone else would emerge from the distance, walking their dog (our dog wasn't even born yet). We'd pass in the night. Moving through our own shifting thought streams.

There would be nights like the one above in "Neighborhood Nocturne," clear and cold and filled with stars. The pace would slow in the dark spot between streetlamps because the stars were brightest then. The air was clear. Breathing was a sensation. Coming back into lamplight, I could see my breath.

At some point I would begin to feel the cold. It was time to circle back toward the house and some supper.

Things to Come ... and Go

You Miss 'Em When They're Gone

I was walking my neighborhoods long before the pup came along.

Walks have always been a way for me to rant, rave, arrange thoughts, give a rousing sermon and still have friends.

Not that I am one to keep my thoughts to myself. People who do that don't blog.

The old neighborhood had an appreciable pond on a neighbor's generous-sized lot, by the road.

The pond bed was probably a sinkhole, judging by the funnel shape the water collected in.

The road meandered lazily around that depression and various trees and shrubs filled the space between the two.

The decade or so up to that point in 2000 had been a wet one. At least once I had to turn back on my walk because the roadway was under water from the rains. Properties across the street became waterfronts.

Being genetically Canadian, I love a broody walk with overcast skies and cooler temperatures, so the detour didn't bother me. There was more than one way to meander the neighborhood.

The years closing in on Y2K were dry ones. Heat and no rain took its toll on the pond's water level.

The drought continued throughout the South. Little rain. A lot of heat.

I continued my walks past the pond, remembering the painting I had done of it with ducks in among the shoreline bushes. No ducks were there now. The waterline was way below the bushes.

As the months wore on, the pond continued to dry up. City trucks came to remove the dead fish. Groups rallied to save the turtle population that relied on the pond.

The pond became a bowl of dust.

For a long time after that, walking by the former pond was a sad affair for me.

There is something almost holy about a body of water. The interplay of light and shadow. The line drawn at the surface between the opposites of air and water. We air breathers above looking at the swimmers below, looking back at us.

The natural community whose life is supported by that body of water numbers the walk-takers as edge folk. Day trippers. Tourists.

The part of the community that could, moved on to another life-support system.

Of course, the weather turned. Eventually the rains fell again.

Slowly, the pond also returned.

But while it was empty, talk of a warming globe had my attention.

There was a practical demonstration going on right there in my neighborhood.