Gone Walking

I have lived here a long time now, and I have taken near-daily walks—cleared my head, eased my limbs out of the posture of desk work and heavy lifting. You'd have thought I'd have traversed every road within an hour's walking, therefore, but yesterday I left the house in such a haranguing hurry that I wasn't much paying attention to the direction I was traveling, until all of a sudden I was somewhere new.

It was one of the prettiest bits of country I'd ever seen—a meandering margin of green, stone walls, wild daffodils, two ponds, a squat waterfall, and in between the new homes were old barn structures that seemed at least two centuries old. This kind of country telegraphs its own history and yesterday it dissipated my fisted-up mood. For there is hope, always, in the new discovery, and yesterday what I needed most was hope.