The best thing about walking...

Walking around this town makes me happy. There is the quiet road by the river and the slip roads in the park by Virginia Lake. There are the old trees and dogs that come bounding up to you. A golden retriever appeared today wagging its tail at me and walked alongside for a while. Ducks came up to the entrance of our house the other day, it was amazing. Today, I was out walking for most of the evening. I watched the orange evening light turn into blue and inky black. The stars started to appear quite quickly in that pointillist way they do sometimes. I had the cold evening breeze on my face and I walked homewards. I thought of a paragraph from the book I'm reading. "Our lives spent in rooms, our imaginations and outlooks framed by windows--by concepts, logic, language--most of us continue to think of nature as a place to visit, wearing sunscreen and suitable protective clothing. Visitors in the museum of the great outdoors." (The book I'm reading is called The Picador Nature Reader and is edited by Daniel Halpern and Dan Frank)