Just a Walk in the Woods

The Boston Herald

January 12, 2001

I had no intention of walking her Tuesday. It was cold. It was snowing. And I hadn't walked her for months. My fault for not making time for her. "Not now, Molly. Not now," I said so often that Molly the Lab gave up on me.

We walked every day at noon for so many years that I thought we would always walk. The clock in the front hall would chime and Molly would race from the family room or leap up from under my desk, tail wagging, brown eyes begging, nudging me with her nose, hurrying me into action with a series of yelps that drowned out the chiming clock, the street traffic, and the voice of whoever I might have been talking to on the phone.

Noon was sacrosanct. Noon was ours. Then one day it was noon and Molly wasn't at my side. Did the clock wind down? Was Molly asleep under a bush in the back yard? Was I for too many noons somewhere else? When did it become so that when the clock would chime, Molly would look at me, and I would look away?

Tuesday morning I was upstairs at the window watching the falling snow. No wind was twisting it or making it beat against the panes. It was simply falling, silent snow - the kind that's inside those little glass domes. I was thinking that my whole back yard looked like something that should be under glass.

I should go for a walk, I thought. But it was just a thought, not 12 tolls of a bell. I never spoke the words. And yet, Molly, asleep downstairs, somehow heard. Suddenly there she was at the bottom of the stairs, tail pounding, making her "Take me for a walk" sounds.

It wasn't easy treading our way down the slippery path to the football field. She slid and so did I. But only at the beginning and only when we were going downhill. After that, we didn't have to watch our steps because the snow was thick and cushioned the ice beneath.

I have walked the path near my house in all kinds of weather. And I have walked it in snow, in knee high boots with the wind blowing the air white. But Tuesday was different. The path was different. It wasn't the short, bulldozed trail the kids cut through every day on their way to school, the thin jagged line that runs behind people's back yards, suburbia's excuse for woods. It woods - Walden Pond, a trail in Vermont, a footpath around Lake Louise.

The snow was fresh and Molly and I, like Indian scouts, made the first marks. The sky was gray-blue. The trees - tall skinny ones, saplings, fat evergreens - were cloaked in snow so weightless it didn't bend the branches. The snow squeaking under our feet and the steady rhythm of our breath were the only sounds. This shortcut off the main road on a normal day, a forest this day, so far removed from the road that it felt removed from time.

Even Molly, who walks with her nose pointed downward like a divining rod, who is in constant search of candy wrappers the high school kids drop and stale bread that people throw out for the birds, walked Tuesday with her nose in the air, as if she too knew to lift her eyes.

That night I talked to a friend who is in Florida for the month. "The weather's been perfect," he said. "In the 60s and sunny every day. It couldn't be better."

"That's great," I said, but I didn't quite mean it. I thought of the morning and the walk and the silent beauty of the falling snow and knew that no 60-degree day could ever be better than this.