Dogs And Trees And Children -- Oh My

Chauncey and I have found a nearby park to walk in, a sure sign that we are settling in. It's not beautiful except in its authenticity. It is a small inner city park with four ball diamonds, one for each size player, attached to an elementary school, sprinkled with swings and trees. There is a huge business of some sort across the back behind the hedgerows. I can hear big trucks there and see an occasional set of tires roll by.

We won't walk here forever, but I like the idea that we can get here by walking, and I like the trees. There are some really old sycamores, big trees, maybe six feet around, whose leaves have shaded many generations of children playing. It is a living park, filled with the shouts of people cheering on their favorite team at night. Neighborhood children play basketball on the cracked asphalt, sometimes with basket balls, but more often with whatever ball they happen to have at the moment. Today it was small and red, about the size of a golf ball, but all rubber. A dump truck was bringing in loads of wood chips to put under the swing sets, its warning beeper echoing across the nearby road as it backed up and a man was running a heavy roller over one of the smaller diamonds, then putting down the white lines.

Chauncey and I always enter through the parking lot and then meander our way around. Sometimes using the crushed white gravel path that runs behind the ball diamonds and sometimes just going from tree to tree. He likes the way they smell. My thoughts are more fanciful, I think, but who knows what he is thinking? I remember lodge pole pines that smelled like butterscotch in South Dakota and I like the smell of pines and furs. I suspect he is paying attention to all the dogs that came before him.

It takes about a half hour to circle it and go back home, just long enough right now. We've just started this walking business again. There are other parks nearby that we can drive too, but that is for later in the year when our habits are more set, our lungs better developed and our hearts needing more inspiration.