`Observing All the Things We Meet'

Keeping my brother-in-law’s dog for a week gives me a ready-made excuse to take an extra walk each day. The park is a mile away and the route we follow snakes through a working-class neighborhood of small houses like the one we rent, with one floor and no garage – “ramblers” they’re called. November means rain in the Northwest. The sky is gray milk and people talk about the sun as though it were an estranged relative. I’ve lived here long enough not to bother with an umbrella.

The chill seems to spur plant growth. Our lawn is home to a second wave of mushrooms, a different species from those erupting late in the summer. Under the magnolia is a third sort of fungus – myriad little white umbrellas. Like cheap toupees, lichens and moss cover tree trunks and branches. In Ohio and upstate New York, where I’ve spent most of my life, November is a time of hunkering down, moving inward, dormancy – “a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” and all that. Not here. Except for insects, there’s as much to see as in June, and people ignore the ever-falling drizzle. I passed a plot of gray sunflower stalks, as tilted and gaunt as a herd of Giacomettis. Crows tug-of-warred a corn cob. The front of one house was hung with dozens of wind chimes, and I gave thanks for living four blocks away. I thought of the heroic age of walking, when Coleridge covered 40 miles in a day to visit a friend, and I thought of this stanza from Thomas Traherne’s lovely “Walking”:

“To walk is by a thought to go;
To move in spirit to and fro;
To mind the good we see;
To taste the sweet;
Observing all the things we meet
How choice and rich they be.”