To burn off the weight of being inside for too long on a sunny day, I go for a walk, follow the wood violets into a park, into the smell of fresh wood chips and kids playing soccer. To avoid getting caught in conversation, I take to the perimeter, along a trail leading into the woods, past a painted turtle on a log in a shallow pond. Or at least his shell on a log in a shallow pond, no sign of his head, or feet. He, too, must have needed a break. I snap pictures on my phone–daisies, a kite, strange buds on a tree, and turn at the kitch-kitch sound of a ruby-crowned kinglet hopping through last year’s Fall and the bare branches of a shrub. I only know the name of that bird because I Google it right then and there–finch with red dot on head. I figure I’ll get a list of misdirected links but no, there it is, an image of the very same bird, red tuft of feathers right at its crown, with notes on its behavior, “forages almost frantically…seem nervous as they flit through the foliage.” Nervous, for sure, I can’t catch even one tiny photo of him. So I keep walking. On a bench at the top of the trail, I listen to the cars along the highway a short mile away and feel full of city with that noise in my ear and my cell at my hip, so I put the phone in my backpack, take out my pen and paper, write notes on my own behavior instead. Those notes stay in my journal, but here’s what I can reveal: the sun warm at my back, the way the wood violets push through, press forth along the forest floor, the vertical lines of tree trunks, limbs angled, branches fanned, hungry for the coming change.
