Solved By Walking

It had been like when you’re a little boy in the woods and fields and on the dusk homeward walk you did it all with your eyes to the ground, scuffling, thinking, whistling, like little Indian boys must feel when they follow their striding fathers from Russian River to Shasta two hundred years ago, like little Arab boys following their fathers, their fathers’ trails; that singsong little joyful solitude, nose sniffling, like a little girl pulling her brother home on the sled and they’re both singing little ditties of their imagination and making faces at the ground and just being themselves before they have to go in the kitchen and put on a straight face again for the world of seriousness.