What we did at recess was walk. Walk and talk. Our school had plenty of space around it. We walked and talked, and I knew I had an absurdly mature interest in both. Today I will do the same.
I signed up to walk a 10k last year, just to say I had. I hate the getting up early part of doing the 10k. The walking was okay. The post breakfast was delicious.
I walk alone plenty, and enjoy that, but physically moving yourself with friends is different. Stories come up that wouldn’t, otherwise. People trip and fall down. Streetlights are navigated. There is all the time to stop and discuss everything around.
I wish I had a transcript of a recess walk and talk thirty-five years ago. We discussed math lessons, maybe, the books we were reading, certainly, the people we were in school with every day, pretty consistently, for seven years.
We had the creek, which we walked along, our special tree with the manhole cover to sit on, right next to it. We had crabapple trees that gushed fragrance in the spring. We had a mysterious house across the creek. We had a cemetery just beyond the soccer field.
In my new neighborhood, I have a quartet of fluffy white doglettes who sometimes wear sweaters. I have the low, dark walls of the old mansion turned meeting place. The low building where people pick up the bags of snacks that go into their vending machines.
Landing 