Since my return I’ve taken five aimless and devoted walks. Each day the temperature would boil steady in the afternoon, my studio would turn me soggy and yet my badly conditioned apartment air was still far too warm to enjoy. There is truly no machine that can make the earth air new. So I’d journey the streets, content with the thick air sliding between my clothes, shining my brow, and plunging me beneath memories of humid summers past and former dreams of humid summers future. In a mid-continent swelter, I walked slow and smiled at a world that passes on and on, with or without me. It’s an okay thing.
I picked up a grocery list, a library slip, a medical release, and dozens of twigs and green blades. In each direction I went, watching the asphalt turn from a polished silver to a golden gleam to the most uncertain pink. Finally the sun would peak behind something tall and a breeze would tell me I could turn for home. Oddly enough, I found that the slower I walked, the better I felt about tomorrow. And yet if I simply stopped, to see the bursting urban bourns around me keep on churning, to watch the city see straight through me as if I never came, my heart would stretch and fall like the dough of a pizza pie just before it breaks. Barely moving I felt humble and hope. But with legs planted, I closed my eyes feeling heavy and late.
On the weekend, family arrived with affection and humor. We’d walk about here and there, making short lines through the muggy city I had so recently measured and surveyed. I made jokes and they laughed. My sisters brought along a doting sense of optimism I didn’t deserve to enjoy. I was glad for the momentary relief, though the many tomorrows stung beneath the words of each exchange. My mother put her palm to my cheek and looked at me with that face I can’t even bear. My father bought me a Maker’s Mark and smiled behind his Bailey’s.
It gave me great pleasure to see that finally, after so long, my own family walked too fast for me. Sisters with strollers and Dad with late-as-ever Mom, they each kept a pace just a knock faster than the one I liked to keep. Walking a step ahead, they’d look back and ask me about every kind of next, be it the hour or the year. No matter the question, the answer was up to everyone but me. And like the days of so many summers here in the middle, that fact burned but it was alright. To know nothing and know it well, it was almost heavenly with equal emphasis and a submissive, afternoon kind of ease.
My Sunday morning walk never started. Instead I rested as I really should. Not just in bed, but in their hearts, and in their eyes. We could plant our feet and smile, resting even in the slowness that only love and family brings. This life, this hot dream, has more questions than it does answers. And with those questions, I lie awake beneath the late loud hum of a leaking coolant and know that like a river, something certain still abides.