I love taking walks. I admit I should do it more often. The photo here, is the scene I came back to on my most recent walk. I nearly missed how beautiful my squash looked on CeCe’s porch.

There’s something about walking side-by-side with someone that frees the conversation to go deeper. When my children were teens, this seemed to be the best way to get to know what was on their minds.

Going nowhere or with a destination in mind, it hardly matters. The pace is slower, the eyes see things we miss when driving, our minds become free to wander, the heart opens up to possibilities.

Walks by myself magnify my ability to let my mind wander like jazz improvisation. This week, I did just that. I took a long walk with no destination. I wandered across broken sidewalks, past a beautiful fall tree, and through a graveyard. Along the way, I snapped some photos. Each made me think of stories I might like to write.

Decrepit sidewalk in front of a house

Why? Does evil lurk within? Or is the evil more insidious: an elderly woman, no longer able to care for herself or her yard. She’s left to suffer children daring each other to ring her doorbell and run. Or maybe it’s a rebel, unwilling to pay the extra village fee to fix the sidewalk that everyone walks on.

I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree…

Yes, that’s from the poem by Joyce Kilmer. My mind wanders back to 7th grade and Mrs. B, who made each of us memorize a poem every week. Ugh! Why? Now, I am so thankful she did. Art Allen was my love back then. He sat in front of me. He stretched his legs back, and I put my feet on the back of his shoes. Electrically touching in secret. He broke my heart when he chose Julie over me. She a city girl, me a country bumpkin. Or so I thought. All kinds of stories about young love, spring from the right side of my brain, begging to be put to the virtual page.

A certain Fidler among many

This one really got my imagination going. At least a dozen Fidlers buried side-by-side, and only Kenneth earned a nickname or an epitaph. What was it about 25-year-old Kenneth? Obviously, he liked to laugh. Was he a storyteller, elaborating on what really happened? Or was there something un-resolved about his death? How did Chuckles die? Could he have been murdered?

Writer’s block?

Billy Osogo wrote about “The Nothingness of Writing.” He wonders how writers overcome writer’s block. I have writer’s surge. The more I write, the more things I want to write about, until I become almost paralyzed by the ideas swirling in my head.

Does anyone else have writer’s surge? If you do, I’d really like to know how you calm the storm.