Sole Sister
The year I turned 50, I started walking. I didn’t know where I was going. In circles, mostly. I like loops. Left to my own devices, I don’t know when to stop, when to turn back. I need a loop to bring me home.
When I started walking, I lived in a house with a husband near the trail that makes the 3.75-mile circle around Back Cove in Portland. He and I had been in the house for five years, but I didn’t walk. I had a mother in failing health, a new-to-us old house we were rehabbing, a full-time freelance career, and work and social obligations occupying every inch of my life. Who had the luxury to walk in circles? Not I.
I turned 50 11 days after my mother died at the age of 82. It had been a protracted decline, a long goodbye. No illness, per se. Just a battery of insults: arterial fibrillation, mild emphysema, a blocked carotid artery, and then the TIAs — or mini strokes — that eventually took her down. She was in and out of the ER and rehab, always able to return to her condo, until the eventual move to assisted living. I say the TIAs took her down, but in truth I know it was the move. She wanted to know when she could go home. My brothers’ and my care for her, especially toward the end, was constant, often daily. When she died, we were so tired.
But rest didn’t come. They don’t tell you about the caregiver adrenaline that doesn’t stop when the caregiving’s done. Each morning I leapt out of bed, ready to face the next urgent task or emergency that did not occur. What to do with all that excess energy? Walk.
Thus began my loops. Day after day, week after week. Round and round. Clockwise one day, counter the next. I slogged through mud and skidded on ice. I was pelted by rain and charged at by dogs off leash. If I was wearing gloves, sometimes I picked up litter, but just as often I didn’t bother. I tend to rehearse when I walk, and I’m not afraid to wave my arms and raise my voice. I thought of myself as the Madwoman of Back Cove. Maybe you saw me out there.
More than anything, I looked at birds: in the winter, goldeneye and buffleheads; come spring, the shorebirds, like egrets and herons. On one occasion a snowy owl glided silently before me from rock to rock, then spread its white wings and soared away.
At some point I supplanted meeting people for coffee or beer with walking. The Back Cove loop is an elegantly succinct hour, as is my preferred trail at Evergreen Cemetery. That makes for a tidy visit or meeting. No ambiguous endings. You know when the loop has been closed.
Walking with various writer friends got me through the pandemic. We met on the streets of Brunswick or Bath or Portland, both of us masked, one of us on the sidewalk, one on the street, always at an arm’s length away. Maybe we touched elbows or boot toes, heads turned away, before we parted – at times, my sole human contact for the week. My friend Tanya and I met twice a month for almost two years on various hiking trails around the state — each of us traveling, frequently on the same roads, in our separate cars — and walked for miles. We took turns packing lunches for each other, and we picnicked, blue masks slung beneath our chins, straddling fallen logs, sprawled on slaggy shorefronts, perched atop snowbanks, or balancing in rickety lawn chairs on town docks, where potato chips lifted like leaves and were carried away by the wind.
It’s been 15 years since I started walking, which I continue to do every day, twice a day, but no longer from the house a few minutes from the trail where my path began. Nine months prior to my 60th birthday, I stepped out the door of that house and just kept going. I didn’t know where to. Nowhere, really. But wherever I’ve landed since then, I’ve continued to walk: on the East End Trail in Portland, in the Western Maine foothills, on a friend’s dirt road under the shadow of the Bigelow Range, and now in my woods life a half hour from Portland. Not necessarily in loops. Sometimes I just have to turn around and backtrack.
To be a wandering woman, particularly of a certain age, is an unseemly thing. My unsettledness makes some people uncomfortable. They wish I would find a home and settle. That’s my problem, though. I don’t know how. People have no patience for that, but it’s not like I asked to be born with this wild heart.
Besides, you see wondrous things when you walk out into the world every day. If you like, I’ll tell you about them sometime.
Elizabeth Peavey is a Maine writer, performer and educator. This column (along with last month’s Bollard cover story, “Peavey Presses On”) marks her return to print after an eight-year hiatus, during which she mostly shared her work with squirrels.
