Happy Hour

 It's been a stressful week. Today is Friday and I've had my nose to thecomputer for about 24 hours off and on, or at least it feels like that. It's billing statement time, and this always gives me a headache. Each time I generate a bill, I feel the story of the bill almost haunting me. If it's an unpaid co-pay, I wonder: Did we just forget to collect it at visit time? Or was the person at the end of their paycheck and couldn't afford the $25? If it's a balance that's been carried over for several billing cycles, I feel the muscles in the back of my neck tensing up and I find myself wondering if the non-payer is a deadbeat, or just can't afford to pay. Regardless, all those little scenarios that I play to myself end up in the muscles of my neck and my back. I had to get out for awhile.
I hadn't exercised yet, and I knew that a Zumba class was happening in just about an hour. But I looked outside.It had been storming most of the day, but now the sun was filtering through the trees, and a light mist covered everything. It looked downright magical. I'm spending a few days here at my mother's in Shepherdstown while our daughter is interning at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, and she lives in a subdivision right on the Potomac River. It's a great place for walking, and I was feeling a distinct invitation. So I went out and walked for an hour.

I took my phone, which has  a camera. I realized as I walked, that I wasn't  thinking about all the week's problems, or all the small ones I had perhaps imagined hiding in the billing statements. I was looking at things. I started taking some pictures. I'm not a photographer, but that didn't stop me from seeing wonder in everything around me. The simple majesty of a giant tree... the juicy wild raspberries waiting along the road for me to pick...the yard of the neighbor who makes "stone people" and has enchanting wooden sculptures hidden in her forest....the loneliness of a tractor, abandoned for the weekend even made me feel a bit melancholy. The cascade of maple tree seed pinwheels, and the lazy descent of one unlucky enough to get blown away... it all became a lovely collage of images that slowly calmed me as I walked along. I realized as much as the stress points in my life became a physical part of me, the beautiful things also do. I don't know why I never thought of it that way before. But now that I know, I vow to consciously seek out the ordinary beauty that lives all around us and allow it to become a living part of me.

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