Dept. of semidaily walks

The new dog who is often mistaken for a bear.

The new dog likes her walks. We head up the road and hang a left, trudge up the hill. Dogs will trudge happily. That is perhaps a key distinction between dogs and humans, one I am trying to learn from.

The house we pass every walk. It seems to be empty.

 We always pass the same houses, the same barns, but they never look the same. Not even the grass looks the same from one day to the next. 

That same house. Same tree, post blossoms, different angle. Now the rhododendron is blooming all along the side of that house.

This is perhaps a key distinction between my mother and myself. She used to talk about how bored, how claustrophobic, how trapped she felt when we lived in Leonia, NJ, a tiny little town filled with old houses and rhododendrons and spreading old elms and maples. There was a specific tree, a sugar maple, on the main street as we walked into town. I remember it as a wonder. She remembered it as "There's that damn tree again." Of course she didn't drive so in a sense she was trapped there, as the other mothers motored by in their Buick wagons. Another story entirely.