Take a Walk

By Ellie Hodder

Ellie Hodder is the
founder of Women Walk
the Marathon® in
Portland, OR and
creator of the website
www.everything4walkers.com

Musings on the Season

It’s easy to get excited about spring. Suddenly, trees pop leaf buds overnight. Yesterday’s brown, lacy branches are today’s mossy green. The colors are vivid; the air is surprisingly fragrant. You would swear the birds have returned and all of this overnight. It is very hard to miss such drama.

Fall — I like to call it post-summer — is a mirror image. Lush green transforms itself to brown. There’s a nip in the air, a frosty drizzle to the morning.

As fall’s transformation is in process, there are gifts to be had for the observant. This is a time when the best walks are the ones when you slow your pace and sharpen your eyes.

Seeds, Pods, and Flower Parts
My friends have taken to collecting in fall. We stuff baggies in our pockets and stop at the smallest excuse to see what is lying before us. So far we have gathered seeds, pods, flower parts, rocks, sticks, and lots of “we’re-not-sure-what-this-is-but-it’s-way-cool.”

My neighborhood happens to have lots of deciduous trees. Some years they are particularly spectacular as their colors change. I find myself stopping in my tracks to admire the picture.

On a recent walk, one of my walking companions was pointing out the different varieties of maples — lacy leafed Japanese maples, vine, and sugar maples. Their leaves range from small and delicate to gigantic — large enough for a mouse to sail upon in an animated kids’ movie. Did you know that when you crush the leaves of a sugar maple they smell like incense?

We gather beach tree pods — inch long, chocolate brown, bristly pods that open at the top like fish mouths to drop teardrop shaped seeds in 3-D, which are so slippery that they are a challenge to pick up.

We find horse chestnuts, dropped from prickly pods, some with full round seeds, others with shell-shaped, partially formed seeds the size of your thumb. There are crusty walnuts and the occasional acorn with its hat still attached beneath oak on a neighboring college campus. And, many a yard sports rose hips, some orange, others in a dusty pink with light brown variegated pods.

In some neighborhoods, you may find a fascinating star-shaped flower leftover. These are the seeds of the clerodendrum (commonly known as harlequin or glory bower). This flowering shrub, native to Japan, boasts fragrant clusters of white tubular flowers from August through October. The green part where the flower actually attaches remains after the flower wilts. This turns a waxy, bright pink color and has a blue-green, prominent seed at the center, which deepens in hue with time. The crushed leaves smell like peanut butter.

Favorite Places and Time to Play
Fall is a time for revisiting favorite places. There is a particular house on one of my walking routes with a paved yard and two stone lions guarding a flagpole. While you have to wonder about someone who would pave their lawn, you have to give these folks their due for their sense of humor. The lions are always dressed for the season, like huge pumpkin heads for Halloween.

I also have a favorite tree that I visit every year in a local state park. Actually, the tree is dead, but the tall, twisting, moss-covered remains give a jump-start to the imagination. No matter when I visit, I take time to survey it from all sides to see how it has changed. It’s like an old friend.

When is the last time you went to the playground, not for the kids, but for yourself? It’s a gift, just sit on a swing to see what a child sees and to let yourself swing a bit — not too high, just enough to feel the breeze on your face and remember what you loved about swings when you were six and had just learned how to pump your legs.

Have you had a game of Poohsticks of late? Remember Pooh? I did recently with a group of grown up friends ­— mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and wives of respectable folk. What you do is each select a stick and, all together, drop them off one side of a bridge into a stream. Then you all run to the other side to see whose comes out first. At first, the game “officially” was played with fir cones, but soon gave way to sticks, which are more easily identified as “yours” or “mine.” As respectable folk, we played by the most current rules (I lost! . . . or did I?)

Fall certainly brings an urge to nest and nestle inside. Me? I think there may be something so profound awaiting me that I cannot spend those cool days inside. So, I go out.