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Morning walk - Friday, March 19
Mar. 19th, 2021 08:56 amLately, when I wake up too early, which is almost every morning, instead of lying in bed scrolling Instagram and pretending I'm going to fall back asleep, I try to get up and take a morning walk around the neighborhood.
I don't go far, just up and down a few familiar streets. I bring a cup of coffee. There is something about this walk, the freshness, the light, that lifts my mood for the rest of the day. Even though the walk doesn't fix my general fatigue, it wakes some other dozing part of my brain that seems to be roused in only this way, at this time of day -- if I don't catch the sunrise, it doesn't work.
Today I stepped out with my coffee cup into the haze just before a rainshower, when for less than a second each speck of water in the saturated air seemed to glow in a rich gradient. Then the shower broke, one of those subversive showers under a piebald sky, blue and grey, dropping chunks of golden light on cherry trees and shop signs like pieces of a bronze mirror.
My street runs east-west, so I walked towards a white-gold sunrise. The powerlines glowed with rainwater like spiderwebs covered in dew.
I carry an ordinary coffee cup because my travel mug is too efficient an insulator, and the coffee would be undrinkably hot. Today I was listening to the latest episode of Slightly Foxed, which discussed a new archive of letters and poems documenting a friendship between Irish artist Barrie Cook and the poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. The archive includes an unpublished poem by Heaney.
I'd meant to fall back asleep to the episode, but I got too interested in the archive. I discovered, for example, that Ted Hughes kept a fishing diary, still unpublished. I immediately coveted it -- both to read and to have written. Not that I want to learn to fish -- I just wish I had a regular activity to document and be documented by that way. And the fish.
My friend A. in Vancouver is the only person I know who might be interested in Ted Hughes news, so I texted him. We also have Heaney in common, since we both read him in grad school. A. may quite possibly be sick of hearing about Hughes from me -- having a former specialty must be a bit like being the person who always gets frog figurines as gifts. I've never really managed to have a specialty, not a person I want to think and write about forever. Like the fishing diary, I envy that.
In lieu of Hughes, A. is doing a nightly rewatch of Doctor Who from the beginning. He is well-rounded that way.
On the way home along our cross-street, roofbeams thick with pale cherry blossoms now, I found clumps of violets along the crumbling edge of the sidewalk. I had half-forgotten their smell. As I rounded the corner, a bushtit (best guess) made a hard vertical turn right in front of me, flashing me its pale underbelly, the arc of its wings.
{rf}
I don't go far, just up and down a few familiar streets. I bring a cup of coffee. There is something about this walk, the freshness, the light, that lifts my mood for the rest of the day. Even though the walk doesn't fix my general fatigue, it wakes some other dozing part of my brain that seems to be roused in only this way, at this time of day -- if I don't catch the sunrise, it doesn't work.
Today I stepped out with my coffee cup into the haze just before a rainshower, when for less than a second each speck of water in the saturated air seemed to glow in a rich gradient. Then the shower broke, one of those subversive showers under a piebald sky, blue and grey, dropping chunks of golden light on cherry trees and shop signs like pieces of a bronze mirror.
My street runs east-west, so I walked towards a white-gold sunrise. The powerlines glowed with rainwater like spiderwebs covered in dew.
I carry an ordinary coffee cup because my travel mug is too efficient an insulator, and the coffee would be undrinkably hot. Today I was listening to the latest episode of Slightly Foxed, which discussed a new archive of letters and poems documenting a friendship between Irish artist Barrie Cook and the poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. The archive includes an unpublished poem by Heaney.
I'd meant to fall back asleep to the episode, but I got too interested in the archive. I discovered, for example, that Ted Hughes kept a fishing diary, still unpublished. I immediately coveted it -- both to read and to have written. Not that I want to learn to fish -- I just wish I had a regular activity to document and be documented by that way. And the fish.
My friend A. in Vancouver is the only person I know who might be interested in Ted Hughes news, so I texted him. We also have Heaney in common, since we both read him in grad school. A. may quite possibly be sick of hearing about Hughes from me -- having a former specialty must be a bit like being the person who always gets frog figurines as gifts. I've never really managed to have a specialty, not a person I want to think and write about forever. Like the fishing diary, I envy that.
In lieu of Hughes, A. is doing a nightly rewatch of Doctor Who from the beginning. He is well-rounded that way.
On the way home along our cross-street, roofbeams thick with pale cherry blossoms now, I found clumps of violets along the crumbling edge of the sidewalk. I had half-forgotten their smell. As I rounded the corner, a bushtit (best guess) made a hard vertical turn right in front of me, flashing me its pale underbelly, the arc of its wings.
{rf}
