Walking

This morning

I took a walk

in the rain;

it was very wet.

This morning

the rain changed

to snow, and then

I was very wet

and very cold.

The sun came out

and I had visions

of itsy bitsy spiders.

Photograph by Marina Shemesh via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Whose woods these are

The Brush Creek Trail begins in woods and skirts the prairie

It seemed a good way to spend the afternoon on New Year's Day, away from the cardiac arrest of college bowl games. And so I drove 25 miles west to the Shaw Nature Reserve, with its 2,400+ acres of woods, prairie, wetlands, glades, river bluffs and trails.

I walked, sometimes at a fairly steep angle. I stopped and looked. In about three hours, I might have seen 12 people (everyone else was watching those bowl games). For a good hour-and-a-half, I saw no one.

Mostly, I listened. To the profound silence.

I veered off the Brush Creek Trail to the Wildflower Trail

Eventually I reached the gravel bar at the Meramec River. This would be the last of the sunshine.

Four people are needed to span the circumference of this tree.

This doesn't look like a trail, but it is. About 300 feet, mostly in the direction of up.

The view from the top of the Overlook Trail.

Looking down over the edge of the bluff.

I took the path less traveled - although in this case, it made no difference; the two paths converged about 600 feet later.

The way back.

The Poetry of Walking, History and Houses

I live in what is called the “Queen of the St. Louis suburbs,” the city of Kirkwood, population 27,540. Kirkwood is the oldest planned suburb west of the Mississippi River, founded in 1853 and named after the engineer who built the railroad west from St. Louis. James Pugh Kirkwood isn’t buried here; he made his fortune and returned to New York, his home state. But we still have the train station, and it still functions as one, serving the Amtrak line from St. Louis to Kansas City.

I live in the northeast quadrant of the town; the city center is 1.1 miles from my house. In nice weather, which we have generally not had this winter, I can walk to the library, the YMCA, the downtown business district, the farmer’s market, and the train station in under 20 minutes. For three years, I had an office in downtown Kirkwood, and truly does seem like you’re living and working in a small town.

Kirkwood is a walking kind of city. When I take walks, I think about writers and poets known for their walking, like Charles Dickens (up to 20 miles a day) and the Romantic poets, or the 17^th century poet Thomas Traherne, whose poem “Walking” is one of the best known of the poems about the subject.

On Saturday, I managed to slip a walk in between winter storms (the temperature actually reached in the 40s before the next storm hit Saturday night).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Kirkwood Train Station, via Wikipedia.