Walking (Part 7)

When I got home, I changed out of my work clothes into jeans and a t-shirt, fed the cat, and set off for a walk by the river. The leaves were beginning to turn, and the dogwoods and Bradford pear trees looked like upside down ladies wearing red dresses in the sky. When I turned off of the road onto the path, the shade made it feel cooler, and the little patches of light coming down between the leaves of the trees were right pretty.

I could hear birds and squirrels chattering and skittering around in the branches of the trees, even though I couldn’t see them. Did you know that squirrels are rodents? Yeah, they’re tree rats. Their tails look funny to me, like maybe they stole them from some foxes. I’ve only seen a real fox once, and it was at night, so I didn’t even see it good. Maybe one day I’ll see another one.

When I got down to the river, the air smelled better with the cypress trees down in the water making the air smell good. If smells can have a color, it smells like green down by the river. I have a special spot I like to go to. A couple of river birches lean out over the water, and the bank isn’t way high up like it is down closer to the marina and up the canal path. The bank is low enough to skip stones, and I love skipping stones. I’m really good at it and know how to pick good, flat rocks that’ll skip five, six, even seven times before they sink. But they always eventually sink. I don’t mind so much because I know they’re right there in the river, and if I want to, in the summer, I can go in and get them, just pick them up off the bottom, but I have to remember to look out for copperheads.

You always have to look out for copperheads ‘cause they’re the meanest snakes in the world, and they want to kill you dead. They’re even meaner than my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Meanass. No, that wasn’t really her name, but me and Jimmy Smith called her that behind her back, and she never knew! Me and Jimmy used to put frogs in people’s mailboxes. Not in the summer when the hot metal might burn the frogs, but on normal days because can you imagine how freaked out those minivan moms would be when they opened the mailbox and a frog hopped out at tbem? We never got to see any of them open the mailboxes and find the frogs, but we put them in there and had real fun doing it because first we had to catch the frogs, then we had to decide which mailboxes to put them in. Jimmy’s mom made him stop being friends with me after we got caught smoking pot in the woods behind the tennis courts, but that wasn’t until ninth grade, and Jimmy started liking girls a whole lot around then, so we probably would have stopped being friends anyway when I stole his girlfriend to see if I could.

I broke up with her after she tried to put her tongue in my mouth the one time I kissed her. Why would I want her nasty, germy tongue in my mouth? Some girls are gross and weird.

I started looking for good rocks when I was a little ways away from my spot, and I found three good ones before I saw the copperhead. He looked right at me with those teeny tiny eyes, and I ran all the way back to my house and went inside and thought about maybe going down to the basement.