Friday afternoon I went out walking with the daylight fading and the neighborhood all to myself. By then, the sky had filled in from over the lake and snow was in the air. The wind had taken on an icy rip that was beginning to decide my route for me: I went south toward the freeway until the blowing snow had watered my eyes shut and sucked the breath out of my lungs. I turned east down Briardale with the snow swirling past me along the pavement and a steady wind pushing at my back. Not a soul outside, barely a passing car. Who the hell would be out in this? Who would choose to be?
I welcomed the weather turning raw. The snow beginning to stick along the sidewalk edges. The smell of winter in the wind, now and then woodsmoke. The lights in the passing houses, the blue flicker of television seen from the outside. It evoked something that drifted from solitude to loneliness and back again. A sense of other times that I'd taken this same walk, and the way that those same impressions had struck me then. Maybe a little bit of melancholy, but one that felt comfortable. One that felt good to carry around for a while.
There's not much left in terms of memories. It's just as well. All that remain are these brief images and impressions chipped off and blowing by, less distinct now with every passing year. Here and there I've grabbed a few and tried to arrange the bits and shards together into some sort of ragged time line: old phone numbers, last known addresses, names I can no longer put a face to. Juliet's face in silhouette on a starry night in February, when anything was suddenly possible. And again on a silent ride down Michigan Avenue, when that was no longer the case. The Southfield Freeway passing below, the rain on the windows, the steady tap of the wipers. A phone message: “Rich, pick up—are you there? If you don't call back in a half hour, I'm coming over to check on you. So call me, all right? Okay, bye.” And then the phone, unplugged. Trying, for the longest time, to make some sense of all of that. Maybe memorialize it in some way, for better or worse. And then all of it lifting over time—without resolution or necessarily the need for one. Only a quiet sense of that other life being done. And a restlessness, a pull toward whatever would come next.
I stood for a while at the corner of 272nd and Farringdon, watching a little patch of open sky above Willow Park. The daylight disappeared through that hole, the horizon turned to powder and dissipated in the skyglow over the freeway. The wind was gone, too. I watched the snow drift through the streetlight beams and then turned back toward home in the shivering quiet of something already passed. Maybe the worst of something. I let myself consider that, maybe even believe it. There'd been other times when I'd taken this same route over and over. Times when I had to keep moving—anything to keep from being alone with my own thoughts in any one place for too long. I'd left those days to another lifetime, one lived by someone else. Now there were other reasons to keep moving. Now I was glad for a walk to be just a walk.