Puppy snouts + cheesy toast
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A bit more of my Lockdown One sort-of-memoir!
Day 25 – 7652 steps
Mother’s Day.
A French surfer punched a shark off his leg at Bell’s Beach.
Some people with OCD were suffering terribly due to the more frequent hand-washing COVID-19 had made necessary.
A creek in Coburg North had turned bright pink. BRIGHT PINK. Like horrible medicine.
Pillow. Book. Knitting. Argh.
The garden was filled with birdsong, the rain now long gone.
One of the dogs was licking the other’s back obsessively and I saw no better reason to escape into the outdoors than the sight and sound of this.
It was a beautiful day and as I plugged Sue’s book back into my ears I felt so happy to be out in the world, to have a not too sore knee, to be breathing in the crisp fresh air, to be clicking back into a routine.
The park was quiet as I hit the path, the field empty of dogs and walkers, mist rising over that seemingly endless and very bright green grass. I made my way to the wetlands where the previous day’s downpour had shifted things again. It seemed to change every day, no matter the weather. The water level was now higher and the floating vegetation had once more moved closer to the reedy banks.
The cormorant was in his place on the branch that reached closest to the middle of the little lake. He turned to look at me as I crossed to the centre of the bridge and then looked away. Possibly my raincoat?
The ducks and other water birds were sliding through the water and I imagined their little feet paddling underneath the surface.
It was quite the metaphor for how I had been feeling, really. Things now looking pretty good for the next few months, but much scrambling happening to make it that way.
As I wandered over the bridge and into the trees, the tears sprung yet again. What was it about these freaking trees? I wondered. I shall name them The Crying Forest and if I’m ever feeling a bit pent up, I’ll come here and have a quiet sob, I decided.
I walked to the other bridge and looped back around the wetlands, then headed along the muddy pathway to start the trip back home.
Suddenly I realised I had something wet in my hand. It was a black dog’s snout urging me to give him an early morning scratch behind the ears. I obliged and he circled me for three more pats before running off after his owner, who had now overtaken me (social distancing!) on the left.
Ahead the muddy path ended and several concrete paths took its place. There were dogs barking wildly on the grass where these paths intersected and people were standing and staring as a dramatic scene unfolded. A blue heeler was chasing a cyclists along the bike track pelting after the rider for a hundred or so metres.
It was hard to know if the cyclist was aware of just how close the dog was. The pursuant pup’s ears were pinned back and he was barking madly as he kept pace perilously close to the bike rider’s ankles.
Eventually the dog gave up, circling back to his owner who pantomimed a serious dose of doggy discipline and scrambled to put the delighted dog back on the lead.
Inside I was laughing, but I tried to mindful that cyclist may have been frightened. I told myself off for the internal giggling and felt glad that I was not the pantomime lady and that my dog was not the one giving chase.
This very episode was just the things I liked to get anxious about when I took my own dogs out. To see it play out both confirmed my fears and made me feel extremely relieved that I was not the one on the other end of the lead.
When I made it home I decided to whip up something delicious for mother’s day, so I made myself Stephanie Alexander’s cheesy toast and a cup of tea.
I’d do some gardening today, I figured. The rain, a ridiculous number of mosquito bites and the constant trampling of seedlings by the dogs had dampened my enthusiasm over the last couple of weeks, but today was the day I would push away adversity and get some mud under my fingernails.
As Sue said in her gardening for mental health book, “In seclusion she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences.”
The walks had also confirmed this very thing, in ways that I had not expected.
I’d been thinking a lot about my personal history as I’d walked the path that day, carefully clocking the various inciting incidents that had led to me being the complicated (but actually totally okay) human that I now was.
I realised that an early loss of a beloved and close family member had shaped some protective behaviours which stopped me from getting too close to people. And that various childhood circumstances sparked unanchored, lonely feelings.
It’s what happens from here-on in that matters most right now, I determined.
But understanding those turning points was helpful because I could see that a lot of the time I made decisions about my life and how I responded to others my actions were based on feelings and not facts.
The more I walked, the more I began to process this squashed down stuff and out in the fresh air amidst the trees and the birds and the dogs and the frogs, the feelings and facts started to sort themselves into a more logical state.
Complicated knots of circumstance and difficulty somehow simplified and distilled. Instead of catching in my chest, they started to play out in my head in less panicky ways.
Rather than cascading into a tumble of thoughts and physical feelings, a narrative was forming where I was feeling less distressed, less mortified, less hopeless about what had been. Perspective was slowly creeping in.
Instead I was feeling more hopeful, more self-compassionate and more understanding of why I was the way I was.
All this. From walking amidst plants and animals?! It truly is a magical thing.
Day 27 – 9676 steps
I slept in. On waking it was much lighter than I expected and I remember foggily turning off my alarm an hour or so earlier.
I got up and made tea, pondering the idea of making it a long weekend and not writing … but I couldn’t do it. I was keen to get cracking and keep my pace, and I realised I wanted to get a walk in before I got started.
I pulled on my shoes, put on my coat, tucked my dogs into their beds and headed out.
It was much later – 8am – and I expected the park to be busy, but it was quieter than it usually was. No dogs frolicked in the field and there were very few walkers on the path.
As I walked, the traffic ebbed and flowed, devoid of the usual familiar faces. I supposed everyone had their own routine … the earlybirds almost always went early, the 8am-ers sticking to their ritual too.
Perhaps everyone had their own framework to keep things in check during these strange days? Or perhaps they had been doing this all along and were adhering especially closely now that the world had turned upside down.
I’d downloaded Runkeeper to my phone, because I wanted to mark out the distance of my walks and was keen to see the wiggly line of where I’d been winding across a map of my local area.
I also forgot to charge my phone fully, so running Runkeeper and my audiobook and the COVID-safe app drained my battery to almost empty pretty quickly. I switched off the book and trotted along to the sound of my own breath, birdsong, panting joggers and dinging cycle bells.
When I got near the wetlands I decided to walk backwards through The Crying Forest to see if it made a difference. For some reason it did. No tears! The light was different from this angle and it didn’t seem quite so remote and bushy.
There were few ducks on the pond, no hens and no cormorant. A little further along the track a swap hen bottom disappeared into the bushes, its owners scrambling to avoid me. I had hoped we were getting closer, but I understood its shyness.
Just the day before I’d seen skinny jean man in the distance and gone out of my way to walk a different way, worried that we might be … becoming friends. I didn’t want to give him the wrong idea. I was not the sort of person who was ready to make friends with anyone, however nicely they dressed their dog.
When I circled back through The Crying Forest on the way home I walked the usual forwards way. Again I didn’t tear up, not even when I looked at the tree fungus! Perhaps this was a kind of exposure therapy, I thought. Perhaps I just needed to do a little bit of crying and looking at feelings and then the sadness would feel that it had had its day and move along?
I spotted a beautiful mushroom emerging from the leaf litter, it’s top patterned with markings like a prettily decorated café latte. I broke my own rule and took a photo because it would probably be gone the next day, or trampled by a stepping stone obsessive.
When I hit the concrete path a man rode and he was clutching a plastic bag. I could swear that the bag was full of mushrooms, and I wondered if the ones I kept seeing were field mushrooms or some kind of deadly variety that could put you in hospital.
At the very least they had probably been wee-ed on by more dogs than I could imagine, so I decided picking them – even if they were the edible variety – might not be the best idea.
Further up the path a woman appeared out of the bushes dressed from head to toe in grey atheleisure wear. She shook herself off and began to jog away and as I approached the spot where she’d emerged from, I realised there was a steep track into the trees.
It’s weird and great that you can walk past a spot 100 or more times and it can still surprise you, if you look twice.
“A handful of healthy soil might contain miles of mycelia, invisible to the human eye. It’s estimated that there are a million and a half species of fungus, though nearly ninety per cent of them remain undocumented. Before any plants were taller than three feet, and before any animal with a backbone had made it out of the water, the earth was dotted with two-story-tall, silo-like fungi called prototaxites.”
Ref -https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-secret-lives-of-fungi
Seems like walking and writing about it has been a very helpful tool for your health and healing. I'm loving being able to read and follow along. Thanks
Cheers Kate