Dog Park

The water tower looked like something Don Quixote would challenge. It stood on top of the horizon, sandwiched in the middle of the neapolitan view that was the sky and earth. The day was quite obviously a gift; still in the upper sixties despite being six o'clock on the first day of November in Nebraska. It was a day that I needed. I've been fighting the world for a couple of months now and the outcome is still undetermined so the opportunity to switch my brain off was welcome. For around an hour I watched my dog blur around the park trying to both get dogs to chase her and make sense of a world with more things in it than Virginia and I. I had parked on the wrong side of the converted baseball field but the walk back to the car was serene. It was one of those rare moments where I was connected to everything around me both past and future. As I watched Dot zig-zag around the amber grass I easily could have been Meriwether Lewis treading that patch of ground for the first time. The rows of rooftops melted away to rolling hills being showered by the setting autumn sun and I was alone with my dog. Dot stopped at a puddle in the grass and mud and looked at me to ask if it was okay and I told her that everything was going to be fine.