If you spend enough time in the weirder parts of the Internet, you probably know the admonition to “touch grass”. Basically, it is most often used in response to someone who is really out there – who has spent way too much time online and has lost connection with the “real world”, and so someone responds to their wild, inane ideas with the advice to go outside and “touch grass” – to get offline and connect with nature, because they have lost touch with reality.
It’s often used dismissively and somewhat meanly – a way of shutting down conversation. But I think it’s also really good advice.
This morning, my alarm went off at 5:30, like it does every morning. My cat hears it too, and hops up on the bed to make sure that, instead of turning it off and falling back asleep, I pet her instead. I slipped into shorts and my sneakers and sort of shuffled to the kitchen, where I made a cup of coffee and saw the condensate on the windows. I check and it’s 75 degrees and 93% humidity outside.
Some days I listen to audiobooks when I go for a walk, but I’m wrestling with a gnawing low-level problem and need the time to think about it, so instead of putting in my earbuds, I turn off the alarm and head out the door. The humidity slaps me after coming from the cool, air-conditioned house. The chickens in the backyard are singing their “I laid an egg” song, the slight breeze activates the windchimes in our magnolia tree, and the cicadas are singing the song of their people.
My neighbor has put out his trash, reminding me that today is trash day, and so I drag the can to the curb, and begin my walk, looking at my watch as I step onto the road – 5:53 am.
Over the next 45 minutes, I will walk some two and a half miles. I will see the red headed woodpeckers, the mockingbirds, and hear, but not see, the Carolina wren. As I said last week, our neighborhood has feral cats, and I see the ginger tom that I suspect was one of the fathers of our current litter of kittens. I lecture him on his parental responsibilities, and he looks at me with interest, before walking off into a thicket.
As I walk along the small creek, I see a snapping turtle the size of a dinner plate, swimming just below the surface, and am fussed at by a squirrel that I startled. I notice the red buckeyes on the tree at the corner have already fruited – “is it early for that?” I ask myself, and debate looking it up on my phone, but decide to do it later. Truthfully, I will probably forget.
I see other animals that live in my neighborhood – the college professor getting in his car, the physical therapist in her scrubs, walking her dog before leaving for work, the lady with steel-gray hair that always waves at me from her porch does so again, for perhaps the 300th time. The house that had a tree fall on it a few storms back is covered in workmen instead of the blue tarps – a welcome sight for all concerned after a lengthy fight with the insurance company.
As I approach my own driveway, seeing the nearly six foot tall colorful rooster that guards my driveway loom large as I approach, I feel a bit of regret. I’m not quite ready for this time in “the real world” to end. As the door closes behind me, and the sounds of outside – the cicada, the wrens, the windchimes and the roofer’s nail gun – fade away. Today is going to be a good day. Because it already has been.