Walk

I’ve been making an effort to get my older daughter to take a walk with me once a week or so. It’s nothing fancy. We just hold hands and walk a block or two or three. I ask her questions trying to get her to talk, usually about books she’s reading, and we trade observations of stuff we see.

Tonight we walked past the house with the chickens and turkeys (there are lots of houses with chickens around here but only one with turkeys) and the gate in their fence was open. I said maybe the chickens had run away, or maybe they were all bedded down in their hen house and so didn’t need the gate closed. She suggested they had gone away to their other home, a palace where they take vacations - short ones, because if they’re gone too long the people start to worry and also might replace them.

One of us suggested they might have their palace underground, which led to a long side topic of whether or not palace and castle are synonyms and what their different connotations are in our minds. We agreed that palaces are fancy and castles aren’t necessarily and that all literal palaces are castles but not all metaphorical palaces are castles, and some castles are not palaces.

We walked down to the bottom of the hill and around past one of the yards with a big garden. It once had an abandoned chicken coop but some has dismantled that, chain link fence mostly stacked up but one panel leaning precariously. We walked to the vacant lot with the massive old catalpa tree. She pointed out that its trunk was twisty like someone had taken a clay tree and grabbed its trunk in the middle and given it a quarter turn. We walked past another house with chickens, this one with the coop door open, one chicken standing in the dooryway, a buttery light spilling out behind it. It looked cozy. I imagined the other chickens cuddled together under a heat lamp inside the coop and felt a moment of jealousy and a flash of nostalgia for time in my life when I regularly waited for buses and trains at stops with heat lamps.

We walked toward home, still riffing on the chickens, wondering what if all of them share a dream realm - if they all meet one another in their dreams, and the underground chicken palace is in that chicken realm and there are portals that let some chickens go there not only in dreams, mentally, but bodily for short periods of time – you can’t stay in the chicken kingdom forever.

“It’s like they say,” I said, “you can’t stay in the chicken kingdom forever.”
“Who says that?”
“Everyone.”
“You mean no one.”
“Well the chickens say it. And people who are in the know.”
“They would say it if this was true.”
“Right.”
“So they don’t really say it.”
“Maybe they do.”
“They don’t.”
“Maybe it is real and we just figured it out from our great wisdom. Mostly mine, to be honest.”
“No.”

We saw a bat swoop down then and I said “the bats onyl come out at dusk, they don’t like to be out in the day time. Just like that old saying - you can’t stay in the chicken kingdom forever.”
“How is it like that?”
“Well, they’re both, uh, about time?”
“That’s not just like the old saying, it’s just slightly related.”
“Okay but you do admit it is an old saying.”
“No.”

I talk partly to keep her talking. She can be on the quiet side but sometimes she runs with a subject from a book or a conversation, like the magical underground chicken world, and she chatters and gets animated. I try to ask questions and riff to uncover those topics so she’ll chat. Really I just like to hear her talk. Her voice is like her hand in mine.

Of course I love her, she’s my child, but I also like her tremendously. She’s fun to goof and banter with. I like simply being nearby. I want to be with her forever. She’s getting bigger, pre-puberty body shape changes. I can still see the kid on her, she is still my little baby, but I can see the this will not last forever. I know people - men - will soon see her as not a kid. She wore an outfit that was all child - knee socks with cats, a frilly flowery shirt - but flickers of future teenager - short shorts, a long black coat. I worry about her being out in the world, in a society that hates women. I hope we have equipped her to equip herself as needed, and to talk to us when she needs to.

We looped back around toward our house, the sun setting, the air cooling. I hugged her before we went in the house, told her I enjoyed our walk (it was a highlight of my day). She said she enjoyed it too and that it was also good to get a break from her little sisters. I said I understood - it’s fun to play with the littler kids but it gets tiring and you need a break after a while. It’s like the old saying, you can’t stay in the chicken kingdom forever. She rolled her eyes. I set her up to roll her eyes at me a lot and she always takes the opportunity. It’s good for kids to roll their eyes at their parents, to feel smug and superior but also to feel safe and loved despite being above their stupid parents.

I can remember the look of the sky for our whole walk, the flutter of the bats above us, the twist in the catalpa’s trunk but we came back in the house and I have no almost recollection of what happened between then and now - a clatter of housework and childcare and listening to my youngest daughter talk about goslings in a book. Something about our walk wakes my brain back up and being back in the house it goes to sleep, I think from a mix of over- and under-stimulation, demands and obligations that I fulfill largely on automatic pilot. I suspect some of this is due to the telecommute induced breakdown of the space and time barrier between my house and my job. In any case, this is part of why I try to get her to talk a walk with me, to pop back into an attentive being together rather than a passive proximity. Would that I could always live my life like I was on such a walk. But you know the old saying.