Little Walks

2 - Overlake, King County

The world is birdsong this morning. We step out from the old lot of pine needles and gravel, listening as the pebbles crunch under our feet, slowly turning to the sweeping brushes of grass. My shoes are soaked in dew within moments, but glancing back at our trail, the blades shimmer with tiny lights as though they were completely undisturbed by our passing.

Robins hop among the grasses, their orange chests bright against the ground, and their grey-brown wings flare into the sky when we walk past. There's a pond nearby, almost perfectly circular if not for the fallen trees and branches along its edge, and we come to a stop next to it just as sourceless ripples emanate outward from its very center. The ripples brush up against the sides of the pond and vanish, leaving it perfectly still, a mirror of the standing grove surrounding it.

As my traveling companion put it (in finer words than I), most everyone has been here once, but no one is familiar with it. Perhaps not this exact location, but the feeling of being here has some kind of distant recognizability. Stepping outside into a place of quiet, where the natural world still holds some sway. Where grass and trees prevail over concrete and steel. Maybe it's some kind of ancestral memory; a genetic fondness for the wild.

A raven sweeps past far overhead, and I turn to watch it glide. The trees are alive with the knocking of woodpeckers, the clicking of squirrels, the music of birds returned from their winter haunts. From southward skies and holes in the trees, home in time to feel the sun's light warm upon their feathers and dew cold between their toes.

This spring will always come again, eventually. No matter how long the winter seemed, it's always familiar when the leaves sprout green and the grass is no longer coated in frost.

The birds are still singing as we step away from the pond, returning to gravel and dirt with an eye for the day ahead.