Walking

I have been walk­ing to work these last three weeks, and it has been an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence. Two win­ters ago I had to walk to work dur­ing a six-week strike by the bus dri­vers. That was an ordeal: it was the depth of a Min­neso­ta win­ter, and I am not well-craft­ed enough for extend­ed hik­ing. I endured a lot of cold and pain as I trudged my snowy way to and from the bookstore.

But now it is sum­mer, and I feel, cer­tain­ly not great, but at least bet­ter phys­i­cal­ly than I have done in some time. My low­er back is begin­ning to plague me, and my knee twinges a bit (although that I have to blame on my ill-con­ceived attempt to make the trip by bicy­cle), but most­ly I just walk along, get a bit warm, and say good­bye to por­tions of my waist that I was nev­er par­tic­u­lar­ly fond of to begin with. It is a sys­tem, I guess.

Dur­ing my (near­ly) dai­ly walk I am becom­ing much more famil­iar with my neigh­bour­hood as well. Per­haps it is part of matur­ing, being a par­ent, set­tling down and grow­ing up, et cetera, but I find that I am spend­ing a lot of time look­ing at hous­es. As in, “Oh, I like that porch” or “That house has real­ly great land­scap­ing in the front yard” and things like that, rolling through my head as I trudge along. I know we are not going to be able to buy a house in the ter­ri­bly near future, but it is def­i­nite­ly some­thing that we are both fre­quent­ly think­ing about. A home of our own would be a love­ly thing. I just hope that I can do what­ev­er is nec­es­sary — career­wise — to make that a real­i­ty some­day soon.