A walk with no destination

I took the long way home through the park, which is a sentence that only makes sense if you already know I had nowhere in particular to be. The short way is eleven minutes. The long way, past the pond and around by the row of maples that always turn first, is closer to forty, and today forty sounded exactly right.

I counted the trees that had already turned. Seven — five maples and, surprisingly, two of the smaller ones near the fence whose names I've never learned, despite walking past them for three years. Next week it will be too many to count, and the week after that I'll stop trying and just let the color happen without keeping score.

There's a kind of thinking that only works at walking pace. Sitting still, my mind circles the same three worries like a dog that can't decide where to lie down. Moving, somehow, it loosens. I solved nothing large on this particular walk — no decisions, no revelations — but I arrived home a little less tangled than I left, and some days that's the entire point of having legs.

A woman with a dog nodded at me near the bridge, the way strangers do when they've silently agreed the weather deserves comment even without words. I nodded back. Then I kept walking, in no hurry, toward a home that wasn't going anywhere either.