Reruns: October Posts Worth Revisiting

October is such a beautiful month everywhere I've lived. Golden days, blue skies, crispy leaves with their myriad shapes, colors, and sizes. And yes, some dark, wet days of rain and grey skies, but I'll choose to remember the sun as we turn the corner toward winter.

Compiling these visits to the archives takes me down memory lane. This is a selective list, skipping over posts that felt more specific to a time, place, or event. 

I'm listing only the first post of the big bike tour my Sweet Hubs and I took in 2017; you'll find links to the rest of the posts along the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal Towpath trip that add up to 366 miles over 10 days and a lot of fun! I wrote a lot of posts one year with a lot of bike advice and I'm not rounding all that up here, since you can spend time on my bike blog if you want more of that.

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Walking in September: Of Berries and Bunnies

This morning when we went out the door for our weekly farmers' market walk I wasn't really looking around at first. Thus the moment of absolute startlement and wonder when I realized one of the "yard bunnies" we see occasionally was crouched right there under a bush by the sidewalk. I was about three feet away from it when I realized the bunny was there, frozen in place, keeping its eye on the humans going by.

I stopped to look at it for a moment, to truly pay attention. These bunnies are all a soft brown with the somewhat short ears of a rabbit, not the long ears of the hares so often illustrated in children's books. This one decided I was harmless enough that it could go back to chewing whatever bits of green it had found growing beneath the shrubs we intend to pull out someday to replace that area with a front patio/porch set-up. 

We'll still have bushes and I expect we'll still see the bunnies. Two of them had burrows in our yard with babies last year, although we saw sad evidence that those didn't all make it to adulthood. I know, I know, they reproduce like rabbits, but they're little and soft and not hurting anything when they eat the clover I planted in the lawn.

Over the course of the summer we watch the blackberries blossom and then ripen along our route into downtown. I picked a bunch a while back and put them in the freezer until I was ready to deal with them. Eventually I made seedless blackberry jam (a ton of work to deseed, but worth it) and then bumbleberry jam, again deseeding. 

Those bushes grow more than I could ever pick. Others pick them as well, I imagine, although I've only seen a couple of people out there. The ones left on the vines baked in the high temperatures we had in early September and are now hard black nubs, but more are coming along. On each walk we check the bushes and may pick a handful of the sweetest, ripest ones as a small treat. The bushes don't have enough on them at this point to merit a full-on berry-picking expedition, but this tiny bit of foraging adds a little something to the walk. I know they're an invasive non-native species and the thorns are something wicked but that sweetness is a gift, free for the picking.

Now they're joined by other berries and my thrifty inner forager wants to know if these others are edible. I looked up Oregon grape (mahonia aquifolium) and yes, those blue berries are edible, although apparently somewhat sour. I'm going to be on the lookout for them now; they could go into the bumbleberry jam (which is traditionally a mix of at least three types of berries). One comment on the site I read suggested they'll be sweeter if I wait until after the first frost.

White berries? No. Those are likely snowberries and they're poisonous to humans.

There's now some reddish berry along the way on East Bay Drive, or perhaps I'm seeing wild rosehips. Before we drop down the hill to walk along the water we go past a house where someone's wild rose bushes produced beautiful rosehips last year and again this year. I'm tempted to leave them a note next year asking if I could harvest them to try making rosehip tea or jelly.

Walking the same route time after time, I appreciate this routine that lets me tune into the changes through the seasons. If we walked a different street each time I'd have variety but I wouldn't know those streets the way I know this route. It reminds me a bit of my old bike commuting route in Spokane that I rode year after year, knowing that at a particular point in a particular season I would smell the linden trees in bloom. I know this place because I walk.

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Reruns: September Posts Worth Revisiting

For me, September is the start of the new year. Even after many, many years past those school days, something about leaves changing color and the slant of the light heading into autumn makes me want new notebooks and pens, makes me want to write down a list of things I need for starting a new venture. 

Going back in time to reread posts I wrote five or ten years ago, on the other hand, reminds me of the path I've walked that makes me who I am today. It's a walk down memory lane rather than a gearing up for new vistas, and a chance to reflect on what's changed and what remains. Although come to think of it, going back to school each fall was also a chance to think about what I remembered and what I'd forgotten from the previous school year. I'm much better at geometry now that I work in transportation than I ever was in high school.

As with my rerun list from August, some links take you elsewhere in this blog, some to my bike/transportation writing at Bike Style Life, and some to Washington Bikes since I did a fair amount of blogging as the executive director. September is such a beautiful time of year to ride so my fall posts tend to be bike-oriented. 

Rereading these reminds me that some truths are timeless, like the fact that biking to a place makes other people talk to you about their biking and why they didn't bike to this particular meeting in hopes of being granted absolution.
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Walking in August: Of Sparkles and Shorelines

One of the things I love about the location of our house in Olympia is our close proximity to water. Our habit of walking to the farmers' market and downtown on weekends takes us around Budd Bay, for starters. 

One of these weekends in August we also strolled along the boardwalk, known as the Percival Landing Trail. We took our coffee to a bench where we could watch sailing classes of kids trying to round buoys and occasionally bumping into each other in their little Sunfish boats. The sun sparkled on the wavetops like dancing diamonds. 

I made special note of that sparkle as a contribution to the list I would be writing in my journal entry for the day under the heading "Today's delights". Since reading Ross Gay's work The Book of Delights I've been making a point of looking every day for those moments that make me pause and experience a flash of delight. 

For a long time I've believed that I find what I'm looking for and this practice confirms that sense of how my brain works (and possibly yours, too). Rob Walker's book The Art of Noticing gave me plenty of ideas of things I might choose to notice. Layering on noticing delights gives each day its own sparkle, like what I saw on those wavetops past the dock.

For a walking meeting (which oxygenates my brain and improves my focus on the content under discussion), I headed through Squaxin Park to reach the bay. When I take this particular path I don't check the tide table first so I never know whether I'm going to find high water or low. 

This spot has a little pond that gets recharged when the water is high. On this particular day the water was low. The gravelly sandbar I walked out onto was covered with freshly broken shells, telling me the birds had been feasting. Best part? Many of them had an intact half shell—so much more fun to play with. When I find an intact shell I'm a kid again, delighting in finding something rare and special.

I collected a handful and created one of the "art installations" I leave occasionally on my walks. I pick up leaves or stones or shells that catch my eye, carry them with me until I reach a likely spot, and arrange them into some kind of pattern. Imagining someone encountering one of these unexpectedly gives me a little ping of delight thinking about the ping of delight they might feel in that moment.

Photo of a large gray rock with a ledge. On the top of the rock, three half mussel shells; on the ledge, another five half shells; around a corner of rock at the right side of the ledge, another couple of half shells.

I walked back up from that little pond and down another trail to reach a different section of beach. As I neared the beach four happy dogs went tearing past, romping playfully. An animal's joy is pure delight—one more entry for the journal.

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