I love my morning walks with Camden. This past summer his bus stop was moved from the end of our street, just a few houses away, to the other end of the neighborhood. It means we have about a six minute walk each morning, a special time I get to talk with him or just be in silence with him. He tells me funny things about school and shows me this goofy, stilted walk he does without bending his legs with a slight lean forward and nods his head so quickly his blond, stick straight hair hovers for a split second before settling on his perfect head as his foot catches the ground with each stride.
We remark on the seasons changing, the mornings getting darker, the leaves changing color, the leaves falling to the ground, and how we can see our breath in the sharp rays of sunrise peaking through between homes and branches.
As we arrive at the bus stop I marvel at the set of siblings who ride their bikes there and leave them right where they fall in the grass, without one concern about whether or not the bikes will be there when they return. Another kid swings from a thin branch every morning. It’s not good for the tree, the branch now looks like an upside-down U, but it’s such a joy for the kids that I won’t tell them to stop. One morning there was a rake that the kids brought to the bus stop to make a large pile of leaves. The pile, unfortunately, is not big enough for them to jump into, but the trees will get lighter and the ground more heavily laden with the spoils of fall. The trees at the stop hold two scooters high up off the ground. These will not fall with the season, but they’ll be picked up by their owners when the bus returns this afternoon.
I kiss Camden’s sweet cheek as he lines up for the bus, a moment I treasure every school morning. I slowly walk down the hill, often backwards so I see him step onto the bus, and then I turn, taking a more scenic walk back to complete the bus loop. This morning I was contemplating how different this setting is than our previous one in Denver. There was no walking to school, but a 10-minute drive up an interesting street laden with different spoils from the night before. There could have been bikes left in the grass by a bus stop, but they wouldn’t have been there when the kids got back from school. There were trees, but the leaves they dropped could be picked up in a matter of minutes or just blown into the street by Mother Nature herself or from a quick blast from my DeWalt blower.
Moments after thinking of these differences and taking a picture of the contrasting leaf color down the path I was walking on, my gaze was drawn to a cottonwood tree with a frantic, squawking bird in it. That’s when I caught sight of its cause for concern, a large Great Horned Owl, calmly perched with a clear line of sight down to me. The squawking got even louder, I took my phone out and took a few quick photos, and then I just stared at it. I love an owl and I would have loved for it to stay there for much longer, but it looked concerned about my presence and very annoyed by the loud calls from the other birds, perhaps residents of that exact tree. The wise, old owl flew away and I was able to catch a few more snaps of it.
I walked home with what can only be described as a pep in my step. What a special encounter, I thought. What a great way to start a day. I am excited to tell the kids about this. But there was something else… There is little to no doubt in my mind that we made the right decision to move from Denver to Fort Collins last year, but today it felt like all the things, the laughs with Camden, the feral, neighborhood kids trusting their bikes to open fields and their scooters to tree limbs, the fall color of the massive, neighborhood trees, and the owl encounter were targeting any doubt I had about being in the right place. It was a still, small voice and it was good to hear it again.
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