It Could Have Been a Good Hour

We buried my mother on a Thursday, a week after Thanksgiving, and ever since, I have walked. I was heavier then than I am now, about eighty pounds heavier, in fact. The walking has helped. And a Fitbit I received the following spring, a Father’s Day gift, has helped me keep walking. I have battled my Fitbit every day, that is, until this Christmas when my wife gave me an Apple Watch. Now, the Fitbit and the watch battle each other for my attention. Less pressure on me, but still, I walk, not for the Fitbit, not for the watch. Frost’s poem makes me wonder why I still walk.

Since that Thursday in 2016, I can count on one hand the number of days I’ve missed my walk. I was too sick one day in March, the flu. I was traveling once, to Cleveland, and ended up walking through the city and was told, “You don’t belong here,” so I turned around and walked back to my hotel, wondering “why?” One New Year’s day, I just didn’t. I read, and I talked with my wife, and I read some more, and when evening came, we watched a movie together. I hit less than 5,000 steps that day and felt guilty and glad at the same time.

Some days I reach seven miles, some days ten, and every once in a while, I’ll walk fifteen. I’ve walked 20 miles once. During the day, I have walked from Gilmanton to Franklin, from Gilmanton to Gilford, from Gilmanton to Meredith. But primarily, I walk at night, when my workday has metamorphosed into tomorrow’s agenda, at 6:00 or 7:00 or later, 10:00,11:00. I haven’t yet gone for a midnight walk. I might.

The story I tell myself, and others who care to ask: walking helps. I say that it clears my mind. The country lanes in Gilmanton refresh me in every season. The wild turkeys and deer who inhabit the same lanes, the red fox in summer and its silvered sister in the winter, the bays and roans swirling hay into their mouths at dusk in August, and huddled close together in the January wind, brooks overrun in April, asserting themselves in sound through culverts under dirt roads, a red barn plopped against a green-pink-orange-yellow field, foregrounding a dazzling September sunset -- all of it refreshes me. And it’s true, I think.

But Frost’s poem “Good Hours” makes me wonder. Do I walk for this refreshment, to settle a what has troubled me, to clarify what has been obscured by the day’s “gettings and spendings,” to become more mindful of others, my impact on them and theirs on me? Yes? Is there anything else, something about my walks I don’t tell myself?

In the first two stanza’s Frost’s speaker is buoyed up by the snow, the smiling eyes of cottage windows, the music coming from within the cottage walls. I am too.

On Christmas Eve a farmhouse family saw me trudging up a snowy hill, in the dark, toward their side porch. A group convened on the porch a few feet from the road, and sang to me “We wish you a Merry Christmas.” To me, for me. Their laughter and song, along with the Christmas lights adorning their porch, buoyed my spirits for the final 1,000 steps of my Christmas Eve walk. When they began, I stopped in the road and smiled in appreciation. When they finished, I applauded their off-key joyousness, shouted “Merry Christmas,” and continued my walk.

Not until I read Frost’s poem had I considered what might have been. I cannot say, as Frost speaker says, “I thought I had the folk within.” When I am in Gilmanton, I walk by this farmhouse nearly every day. I’ve said “hello” when the parents or children are moving from house to barn or from barn to house. I’ve never stopped to ask how they are doing? The truth is, I know nothing about them. My Christmas Eve walk might have changed that. Had I mustered the courage to walk up the steps of their side porch, I might have a new family of friends.

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A Gilmanton neighbor, his name is Matt, walks as well, but his walks hardly pass for walks -- a mere fifteen minutes or half hour. On our walks, we pass each other often and join each other from time to time. He is older than I, just retired. When we first met, he was on one of his short walks. He approached the stone wall separating our front lawn from High Street, and to my surprise, he stopped and pulled from his coat pockets two beers. One was for me. I stopped raking. We talked, he on one side of the wall, and I on the other. I learned he had wanted to buy the house my wife and I had just purchased (we had not yet begun living there), but he was unable to sell his house just thirty yards from mine. I learned about his job (he hadn’t yet retired but had set a date), his children (former high school heroes and now parents themselves), his wife (she puts up with him), the book he is reading (always historical fiction), his feelings about the “Washington idiots” and good Scotch. Not big stuff, but stuff, anyway. When we had finished the beers and the conversation, he smiled like he had just made a new friend, turned and walked the 30 yards back to his house.

We had shared a good hour, so totally unlike the good hours I spend on a walk.