.png)
“Happy 8th Birthday, Emma!” declares a blue garbage can on SW 40th Street.
“We’re All In This Together ❤️!” shares the window of a modest rambler. “White Silence = White Consent,” warns a homemade poster angled on an overgrown bush.
I’m on my millionth walk of the year—this number is not exact, but I estimate it’s close— at the end of which, I will look down at my shoe and see the beginnings of a hole worn through my soul sole.
The first walk I took during the pandemic was on March 12, 2020. Seattle Public Schools had just announced a two-week closure the day prior but the quarantine hadn’t started yet. I made my way around the block at a snail’s pace, my month-old son jiggling below in his stroller as we traversed the uneven sidewalk. While I pushed him, I ate an apple. Eve and her child. The first walk I had taken since our unplanned c-section. Taking walks is a form of regular exercise and meditation for me, but this post-baby, early-stage pandemic walk felt trepidatious, a voyage of discovery. Where could we go? Where would we go?
A week later, I took my son down to the park near our house. I can’t recall if I was wearing a mask. The pandemic was still too new, information slamming us in the face from every angle, impossible to know which sources could be trusted, and how everything would pan out. It was a crisp, bright blue sky kind of day. My son slept while I strolled, gingerly treading the pathway, inhaling the fresh air like a drug, releasing the stuffiness of our little house up the road. I stopped at a large boulder to admire the L.O.V.E rock, which is what I call it (not an original name, as you will see) because it is where people spell out the word “Love” using shells and stones, branches and feathers, flowers and fragile materials. Fragile like our own hearts, fragile like the word itself.
Weeks later still, I came upon a rain garden replica of Puget Sound created in a neighbor’s yard a few blocks up. I wondered how they’d build it, I might like to have a rain garden someday too. As I walked, I began to memorize the landscapes of each yard I passed, the magnolia trees, camellias, roses, overgrown hedges, and blackberry bushes. Some houses looked unkempt and forlorn, like how I felt on the inside. Other houses had toys in the yard, the detritus of young children, like how my own home would look as my son grew. I waved at the people out in their gardens, digging with spades in the earth. “Finally! Some time to clean up the yard!” they would joke, a self-conscious laugh to follow. I laughed along with them.
It was nice for a spell, the ambling walks, the whole “no work” thing, the forced slowing down. But as the lockdown extended for the second, third, and fourth times, after we’d all watched Tiger King and Love is Blind, The Great British Baking Show, and all nine seasons of The Office, I found myself walking for longer and longer stretches. Once I logged three hours. I walked while my baby napped, quietly sobbing along the cement like a newborn myself.
Our daily walks provided a break from the monotony inside the house: feed, nap, stare, play, feed, nap, stare, play, scroll Instagram, gape at the news. A Black man is killed. And another. Ivermectin and bleach. Air Strikes. Protests. Layoffs. Fires and biblical storms. I walked because it was all I could do to keep from staring in horror at the internet. I walked because it was the only time I felt a tiny inkling of hope somewhere deep inside of me. Some days, my husband joined us on his skateboard, and on those days, I didn’t cry.
The little signs of life I encountered deepened my swirling emotions, a chalk outline of hopscotch on the street or a locked playground, both empty of children, the birthday banners in yards with no sounds of parties trickling through an open window, the smell of a BBQ grill, no guests hovering around with their cold beers and a dad jokes. In time, I didn’t know why I was crying anymore, only that I was deeply sad, deeply lonely, deeply, deeply, deeply, everything.
Occasionally, I would pass another walker and they would cross to the other side of the street so we could keep a healthy distance. We wore masks, even outdoors, even in the neighborhood. When my husband got home from his job as an ‘essential worker,’ he would take his clothes off on our porch and run directly into the shower before interacting with us. I started taking depressing, mediocre self-portraits, trying to find a way to express how new motherhood in a pandemic felt.
A year passed. I walked as the grass turned from green to yellow and back again. I walked as the leaves turned golden and crimson, and fell from their branches. I walked as the rhododendrons and cherry blossoms burst from their buds. I walked through haunted graveyards and nativity scenes. I walked through an election, an insurrection, a vaccine and its deniers. I watched as more cars began to fill the road and fewer people tended their gardens. I watched as my son’s face evolved from squished larvae features to bright, smooth, and alert, full cheeks, dimpled smile, a head full of downy blonde hair. All around me, metamorphosis.
I put one foot in front of the other foot, hoping my walks would hold the world and myself together for just one more day. Now, my son could watch the clouds pass and the birds soar above. Now, I could look up at the sky with him, point to the seagull, and show him the freshly bloomed flowers. My walks were not a cure for all the world’s troubles, but they did mend a small patch over my worn and troubled soul.
Comments