Last week (I think it was last week) it was raining—not drizzle, but big wet smacking drops, off and on in the late afternoon—and I put on my sparkly boots and went for a walk on my own. 

I went a different way than usual. Anyone in my family, if left on autopilot on the sidewalk in front of my childhood home, will walk the mile to the arboretum, near where I used to live. Instead I headed down Scott to the elementary school, cut across the field with its gravel path, and out to the back playground where the concrete basketball court is painted with a colorful map of the U.S., a map which is only very approximately proportionate. I stood above the top left corner where Vancouver would be, and then I walked the route my little brother and I had just finished driving a week before, all the way to North Carolina. I watched my feet closely as I went to make sure they were in the right place. When I arrived, I felt a little dizzy with how fast I made the journey.

Then I walked down the green hill behind the school and to the raised beds, full of poorly tended veggies. I was listening to another one of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne books—a middle one, sentimental and occasionally overwrought, but these qualities too are part of human nature. Past the vegetable gardens there was the grass amphitheater, with the steep bowl-like hill that kids slide down on trays or sleds whenever it snows, and the raised hump of a stage at the bottom.  

I wandered back into the woods and across the creek. The crowd of trees is not huge, really it’s right up against Market Street, but it’s crisscrossed with more little paths than I could count or ever knew were there. As I half-listened to Anne make yet another life-long friend, I imagined all the kids who’d gone to school here exploring these paths and wading in the water of the creek, hiding out, building clubhouses, getting muddy, feeling free and grown in the safe enclosure of the woods at recess. This hadn’t been my school, so it was only an imagining, but just thinking about it made me glad. The trees kept me mostly dry, and I went back home when I got tired of wandering in figure-eights. There was writing to do.

It’s raining again today and my mom is playing piano. In any case, I recommend a walk.