Completing the business portion of this little get-away, I stood outside the small, completely non-threatening, brick building housing the Social Security office here in Bellingham. Do I call a taxi? Or do I walk? Because it was only 9:30 and the sky furnace had not cranked up the heat yet, walking seem preferable. I turned on cell phone’s GPS function to see if a walk would be doable. It was a bit far, but I really needed to shake off the tension of the morning. Walking has always been therapy for me - especially for shaking off tension - so away I went.
The route that the GPS had laid out for me was through quiet residential areas. It wasn’t long before any thought of government offices and officers, applications and ID documents, vanished in the warm summer morning. Tidy, well kept homes and yards suggested comfortable middle class residents. Tomatoes planted on an east facing side of a modest home showed a much greener thumb than mine. I envisioned many pints of tomatoes from that well nourished crop. An expansive community rose garden on a corner lot, drying as the day warmed up, still had many lovely blooms despite the dry conditions. A small detour into a garden center presented an interesting water feature. Against a brick wall, galvanized steel watering cans at measured and different heights demonstrating a real trickle down effect, the water pooling in a small water trough. Then, as I got closer to my hotel, I passed a long stretch of wild and overgrown blackberries, some of them ripe enough for me to snack on as I walked past.
Now the thermostat was reaching too warm for this amount of walking. My mind, buzzing with anxiety at 9:15a.m., by 10:00 a.m. was only longing for the cool water of the small hotel swimming pool and a big glass of cold water. I was really breaking a sweat! As far as any worries bouncing around my head yesterday? Vanished. Gone. Pool time, out for lunch, reading, taking a nap, more reading, out for coffee, listening to authors .......a gentle afternoon fading into evening.
“Sometimes it’s not the strength but gentleness that cracks the hardest shells.”
~ Richard Paul Evans, Lost December
Photo on Facebook page.
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