Walk

It’s the kind of week when a friend loses a job and other friends take painkillers and schedule MRIs and everything seems worrisome and you don’t think you can take one more minute of the news, but it’s also the kind of week when you still eat and drink well with friends and get to stand above a huge boiler and fill your pores and lungs with maple-sweet steam and go out for a walk on a sunny, trying-to-be-spring afternoon, and your neighbors are out too, people you haven’t seen in months, all of you buzzing about like just-now-awake wasps finding your wings again, and as you stop to chat with the ones across the street, Emily, standing on the waist-high slate wall in front of you, asks, “Do you want to catch me?” and you do want to, and you do catch her, and you can’t believe how light she still is, because she must be four by now, and her mom confirms that Em is a skinny-minnie, and you put her back on the wall, that beautiful wall that wasn’t there when you were renting that house because (a) you were renting and (b) you are not a stonemason like the present occupant, and Emily has a grape lollipop and walks down the wall to talk to Paul, and the German shepherd Anna takes her place and licks your face, and Em, in a brief moment of confusion as to what item is in which hand, licks the stone she has in one instead of the lollipop in the other, which doesn’t bother her but Paul tells the story to the rest of you who were caught up with Anna’s licking and not Em’s (Paul, whom earlier you caught in this position):

and then you say goodbye to your neighbors and hit the rail trail at just the right time to see the flock of fifty turkeys on the hill, and a tom is displaying, and the sun is just low enough to backlight the featherspread of his tail, and the glow of it is so impossibly beautiful that you can’t look away, you just can’t, and you know that he knows that every female turkey on that hill is thinking the same thing.