Practice Walking
Like many people, I walk my dog in the early morning. I say “walk,” but really it’s the two of us first strolling to the end of our cul-du-sac, then retracing our route, past our house, to walk the half-mile to the terminus and back. We do this every weekday at 6:51 a.m., after I hug my daughter and she turns left out of the gate to walk to the school bus stop on our street. Our fox terrier, Sylvie, and I turn the opposite way to avoid my being the weird parent among the group of waiting teenagers.
Once the school bus is gone and its diesel rumbling fades, our purpose—Sylvie's and mine—is to start the day with noticing.
We joke in our family that barking is Sylvie’s one superpower, as a small dog who feels responsible for a big world (full of tall people, squirrels, and noises in the night). But when it’s just the two of us, I see that she’s pretty good at noticing, too. She already knows all the neighboring dog smells along our route, but she reads the news with her nose, rapt and undiscerning in all the best ways. She stops at all the mailboxes. Halts abruptly to sniff the weed working its way through the cement in front of the labrador’s house. I carry a baggie for the likely doings at the end of the street, which I try to avoid her depositing in the same yard every day, the one with the chihuahuas, but it’s tough to vary our pace enough. I always glance up to see if the chihuahua family—Brian, Paige, Jack—is by chance watching through the front room window as I bend, scoop, with a generous handful of brittle fallen leaves. Sylvie turns her face entirely away.
Today, the light rising in the east is muted by a smear of gray-blue Monet clouds. The air is cool by local standards, but I am forever a Midwesterner and have layer upon wooly layer for this. In fact, I like the tamping chill—it makes our path feel more personal. Sylvie, her rabies tag tinkling as she trots, and I have a private audience with the sky and the birds we hear but can’t see. I’ve been trying to learn birdsong so I recognize more of the life around me, but I’m stuck at cardinals, robins, and chickadees. Also, Northern loons, but they are many miles from here, gliding on the wilderness lakes of my youth.
Suddenly, through the gate of our neighbor’s tucked-away farmstead, Sylvie and I notice SOMETHING THAT’S DIFFERENT: a large, dark animal shape, black enough to be a bear. The hair on my neck zings with fight-flight for just a second, before I notice that the black is moving at the swaying pace of the clouds overhead. A few more steps, and I confirm: it’s a wild tom turkey in full fan, parading back and forth on the shadowy lane. A few seconds more, and three hens dart, headlong, from the brushy cover and trundle deeper into the yard.
Sylvie’s whole body is focused on the turkeys, from the tips of her pointed, upstretched ears to her (probably too-long) toenails straining against the pavement, at the end of the leash. But she doesn’t bark. Like me, she looks and listens.
The hens disappear into tall grass, and the tom folds his feathers back into himself. In a moment, they’re nothing but shadows passing beneath the shadow of still-dark trees. Sylvie’s little muscles relax and she looks up at me, her round, brown eyes soft and ready. So we turn and trip down the sleepy street, privileged and pleased with what we’ve shared. I let her off-leash as soon as we’re inside our gate, and her day resumes at full sprint and five-alarm bark—into the backyard to tree whatever squirrel might have ventured to the ground in her absence.
It’s not a perfectly mindful practice, our walking, but in the end, it’s ease and close familiarity and joy—and the small freedom to notice what’s living right alongside us, each moment we spend looking.
