Sometimes life unfolds like an Emily Dickinson poem of fifty perfectly constructed words that captured the home in Amherst, MA where she lived much of her life. In her mind, journeys were expressed in poems and letters handwritten and bound together with ribbons. For her, the walls of her family’s home were world enough.
These chilly November days my world has grown smaller, shrinking from journeys that once had me walking along cobble stone streets in Paris and Rome in the sturdy leather boots now being resoled by a cobbler in Grass Valley, CA. Those boots are a part of me and the stories captured while walking boulevards and back streets are memories that I continue to revisit in my mind.
For now, my walks and explorations take place near our home in the Sierra foothills. Some journeys unfold in the backyard where I feed the birds and squirrels each morning. Robins eagerly feast on red berries in one of our dogwood trees. Their thirsty flocks have also discovered my meditation path where a birdbath made by my neighbor Anita from a vintage glass streetlight cover rests on a tall six-legged stand. There its clear ponded water is visited by a charm of finches, a murder of crows, Northwestern jays in black and cobalt blue feather suits, a dule of doves, a dray of silly squirrels and seasonal migrating robins.
I take daily walks in the late afternoon from one end of our hilly, treelined, crescent-shaped road to the other. As I walk, my trekking poles tell me where the ground is and allow me to take in the world underfoot and atop power poles. Most days, I have a conversation with a chatty crow, each of us repeating the message of the other. Caw, caw, caw…until it flies away to another tree in the woods.
One day last week, I looked down at the edge of my road before coming to an abrupt stop. Near my foot, a praying mantis was about to cross from a shallow ditch onto the asphalt pavement, just as a big yellow school bus was shifting gears near the intersection up ahead. Seeing the stick-like insect’s future about to be squashed, I grabbed a long twig from the ditch, scooped up the mantis, and stepped back seconds before the bus lumbered by.
“Well, pray tell,” I said to the mantis, “would you care to come home with me?” And so it was that the two of us headed back to my steep driveway and ended up overlooking a woods where traffic only takes place at night along established animal trails. “Life is journey,” I said to the mantis as it stepped off the twig and into a pot of purple salvia. It now lives on my deck where it seems happy to explore the plants in its new world.
Four miles down the road from our home, a self-guided walking guide of Nevada City’s trees is available to all who visit our local Chamber of Commerce. Nevada City was home to Frenchman Felix Gillet, one of the renowned horticulturalists who journeyed to the area in the mid 19th and early 20th centuries. Fruit and nut trees, and later ornamentals found on the walking tour can be traced back to a nursery Gillet established in 1871 and plants he’d begun importing upon his arrival. Along Spring Street, there are towering chestnuts grafted from the original ‘Colossal’ chestnut tree he planted.
Journeys such as these keep me exploring and writing. What also keeps my spirit alive is the belief that history and voting matter. Both have the power to bring about positive change. And so, as soon as local drop boxes appeared around Nevada County, I filled in my mid-term ballot and voted. In a democracy, it’s up to each of US to do so.
Life is a journey. Embrace it!