Solitary Walk

The woods were not silent on his solitary walk that warm September morning. The illusion of silence in the woods echoed in the man, his body quiet but his mind as active as the woods where he sought solace. The birds were precariously perched on the branches of densely packed trees, chirping and calling out to each other like city dwellers perched on the fire escapes of tenements. The sandy path was soft beneath his feet making it hard to walk in his well-worn sandals. Rustling was heard in the nearby brush. A squirrel or maybe a chipmunk was busily gathering food to stock his nest and scurrying home with his treasures, unseen under last year’s fallen leaves. The blue sky in the east embraced the morning sun and fought to hold its stand against the encroaching pewter and silver clouds that were rolling their way in from the west and were boldly certain of winning the confrontation.

His footsteps were familiar with the path. He’d walked it many times in the past. Dried pine needles were strewn and mixed with the leaves that were just beginning to fall from the trees, adding yet another layer to the soil and replacing the layer that had turned to compost. The crunch under foot was a presage of Fall and its relief from the heat and humidity of summer. Most of the trees were pine, tall and lanky in height, with a rough and scaly bark surrounding the trunk that made it easy for squirrels to ascend their summits and meet with mates chattering for them in the high branches. Fallen tree limbs were interspersed in the underbrush at the sides of the path, lying lonely and forlorn, stripped of their greenery and lying naked and stiff in death. Acorns covered the path like children’s marbles in a sandbox, a veritable feast for ambitious squirrels, chipmunks and raccoons alike. In the sandy areas at the edge of the path, grass tried valiantly to grow with only the strongest of its green fingers able to poke out of the ground and through the blanket of pine needles to desperately seek the sun and water it needed to flourish.

This was his world, a place of comfort and refuge in his dreams as it could never be in his waking hours, and he was about to re-enter it whether it was good for him or not.

I feel like the grass that is trying like hell to grow in the wrong place, he thought. It was the wrong environment for it to grow and yet some of it was succeeding. Wouldn’t it be happier growing in a field somewhere surrounded with other grasses of its own kind? Maybe and maybe not, he thought. There were many kinds of happiness. Maybe the struggle was its own reward or maybe the satisfaction of overcoming the struggle. He didn’t want to live a futile life, trying to fit in where he didn’t, but he loved it here. It was where he grew up and where he longed to stay. He would make it work.