Walkabout

Interesting things happen when you go on a walk just before dawn. There is a certain magick at that hour. The world starts out dark, but there's a glow in the east. Today, there was almost complete overcast, though. The only sounds are maybe a few crickets, the occasional car, and some dogs barking as I pass. But I walk on. I live in a well-established neighborhood, where the trees are mature and the houses are not built with a cookie cutter. I can imagine fae folk playing amongst the foliage of the darkened yards, like one of those fantasy worlds I spent much of my leisure time in. But they vanish if I try to spy them directly, so I walk on.

As I wend my way through the wooded streets, the sun makes itself known. A school bus passes, then I see a mom and her kids running toward the corner where the bus turned. I hope they didn't miss it. But I walk on. Suddenly, within the last ten minutes of my short journey, birds burst out in song. The rising, repeating cacophony of a hundred calls, cheering on the day, looking for a mate.

Their melodies and counterpoints carry me home where I must get ready to go spend the day in a box that looks much like the boxes of my cohorts—staring at a glowing screen instead of soaring with my winged friends. Waiting again to walk in the dawn.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.