Walking

 When I used to live in this city, a million years ago now, I walked everywhere.  We all did.  A big family of walkers, we were.  We were not well off, and the one car we had was for my father to get to work in.  This meant that for most of my youngest years if anyone who wasn't Dad wanted to get anywhere, we walked.  Why didn't we take the bus? I have no idea.

I try to patch together these memories sometimes.  At one point there was a school bus. It must have been during middle school, because I went to that school for two years.  I know I walked to elementary school.  I rode the city bus to high school.  It must have been middle school.  But why didn't the school bus stop at my house?  I remember it stopped instead near the elementary school, which was a 15-20 minute walk away.  A funding issue, maybe? Things were different then.

But we walked.  We walked around the old road turned into a trail.  One end had that patch of fossils.  Along the trail were wild grape vines and Mum would collect them for jelly.  My sister and I would walk along the circle path and there was the time we found a huge head of black elderberries and brought them home.  Sometimes we'd find puffball mushrooms in the grass and bring them to Mum to cook.  Much less frequently there might be morels.  She took us to the schoolyard to climb the Rowan trees.  Why were we getting that fruit? I can't remember now.

These were daily walks, not unusual ones.  Our legs were strong and this is what we did.  If we needed groceries we put on backpacks and walked 45 minutes to the store and then home.  If we had a doctor's appointment, or needed new socks, or wanted to get out of the house or be alone with a friend or a boyfriend, we walked.  There weren't places to necessarily walk TO, but we walked.

And then I went to university.  I was even poorer.  I also had fewer places to go, so there was less walking.  I finished school and came home.  My walking had slowed at this point and mostly what I did was ride the bus. Over the years it has waxed and waned.  The small Eastern Canadian town we lived in had no bus. We lived in a slum apartment on one end of town and all of the shopping was at the other end, so we walked.  We walked pushing a stroller, carrying a baby, with all of our groceries, in all weather.  We had no car, so we walked.

The 8 years we spent in Northern Ontario were in a tiny village, and there wasn't really anything to walk to.  We both got out of the habit - now we HAD to drive everywhere.  We grew lazy and plump and more middle class than we'd been before.  

And then the move back to the city where it all began.  

When I started at the first job, I had to walk again.  Up and down the stairs at work, back and forth to the train station many times a day. It was hard to get back into the long-disused habit.  I wore compression socks to help the swelling, reminded myself all day to sit up straight and tighten my abdomen to strengthen my core.  At night, before sleeping,  I lay in bed and wrapped a cord around my foot and carefully stretched out my hamstrings.  It took almost a year to get back in the habit of walking.

After 18 months, I moved on from that first job to another one, closer to the apartment and with better pay.  I walked.  I walked up and down the four flights of stairs to the offices, back and forth to the bus stops again, playing the old mental games I would play in high school: can I beat the bus to the next stop? Can I make it to that street over there in X amount of time?

This story isn't going anywhere, much like my walks, but it just feels good to regain this part if my childhood again.  It's one of the things I missed most about living in a city.  Suddenly, there's somewhere to go to again