Night falls an hour earlier now than it did a month ago. Evening walks that once began in full daylight and concluded against a rosy-red backdrop end in twilight.
I walk the better part of an hour or more each evening and sometimes in the morning too, often with my collie and occasionally with a partner. The pace is leisurely, hardly ever brisk, and frequently interrupted with opportunities to comment about the weather or the progress of someone's garden with a neighbor or passing acquaintance.
By the time I return home I have surveyed a good portion of my town and know much about its business: whose tomatoes are ripened and whose house is being painted and who's hosting a family reunion. These walks fasten me to the community like the couplings on a freight car.
I have walked in places where folks had no business walking, or so it seemed. Strolling to town along one country highway I couldn't go a hundred yards without someone slamming the brakes on their truck, pulling up along side of me and offering a ride. Sometimes I'd politely refuse, three or four times, but mostly I just accepted the generosity; how do you explain a walk without a destination?
There are other lanes I would not want to walk, like those sprawling suburban neighborhoods linked together by busy roads that have no sidewalks, or the towns where dogs run free and nip at your heels while their owners roost in front of televisions that flicker behind darkened doorways.
The best towns for walking are small, mature places with streetlights and full-grown shade trees. These are quiet rural communities with fewer cars and more familiar faces where folks still take the time to wave or talk to their neighbors.
There was a time not long ago, as I recall, when walking was unusual. Everyone kept to cars and yards and buildings, as they still do in some places. Anyone who walked the streets was poor, possibly criminal, and at best, eccentric.
Then came jogging and aerobics and fat composition, and an awareness of cholesterol and heart disease and arteries. More of us became managers and sales people and information professionals. Few of us break a sweat working any more; that's what weekends are for.
Now there's walkers everywhere. We're common in malls, along parkways, and even on darkened small town lanes like this one where the traffic is light and the dogs don't bite.
