Caroline and I walk a lot through our neighborhood, so much so it’s now a routine. If we are in town and it’s Monday through Friday, our route typically covers between 2.5 and 3 miles. On weekends, we can get lazy and opt for a short 1-mile walk to get things going. No matter the initial distance, we always aim for about 5 miles a day, more when we are traveling. But this post is not about distance or travel; it’s about the place where we walk.

It’s easy to take for granted the nature of our hoofing here and there, but frequently, we are greeted with skies that stop us in our tracks, often right here with the palm trees helping set the scene and have us snap a photo. The idea is that someday, we might need reminders of what sunrise looked like if we were no longer able to go out and see them for ourselves. Yes, this is the thinking of people growing older.

As we bolt across one particular wide and noisy street to enter a quiet neighborhood, we first encounter a home that plays host to anywhere from a half-dozen to a few more than a dozen cats. Those felines use parked cars for shelter or for the warmth of their hoods to keep toasty. On roofs, they gain an overview where maybe they signal to other cats the coordinates of prey. Every so often, kittens show up.

There’s a small park the cats often visit, but so do some coyotes. Just the other day, we had a great encounter with three coyotes scouring the park for furry morsels. As they saw us, they took off save for one that didn’t seem to like the idea of running away from a meal but reluctantly followed his mates. We continued our walk, and they continued moving away until that male decided there was enough room between him and the side of the street we were on, and he slipped through to return to his hopeful breakfast plate.

One day this past week or so, we encountered four hawks. Hawks on their own or even paired is not uncommon, but four of them took us by surprise. There are many birds out here, such as the woodpeckers drumming on metal things on nearby homes; pigeons, quail, parrots, and mockingbirds also call the area home. The other day, we saw our first flock of geese flying south. And I shouldn’t forget to mention the raucous grackles, the cactus-loving wrens, sparrows, and the delightful hummingbirds.

There are more than a few ant colonies we pay attention to, various rabbits, lizards, and, at certain times of the year, bats. Along the way, we pass “White Dog,” Penny, Bella, and Lexie, guarding their respective yards. In a previous post, I already wrote of Lucy the Donkey whom we see daily.

Continuing our walk, we are confronted by those people who, not wanting to stink up their own homes, smoke outside and stink up the outside world. Speaking of stench, during these summer months, we pass sewers that have a constant flow of effluvia that can make us wince when we stumble in and out of the cloud. Also of note, we are noticing “Open House” signs for homes on the market again. We’ve not seen those in years, as homes were snapped up before the “For Sale” signs ever went up; something’s afoot.

In one particular home, we are certain, live drug dealers. They are not connected to the electricity grid and have a gas-powered generator to run their operation (a mobile home). The infernal racket just grinds at the ears as we pass, but still, it’s better than being on one of the main thoroughfares where idiots in loud vehicles start the day with the growl of their douchey cars, trucks, and motorcycles. I’ll include this right here as it feels appropriate: we also walk by a lot of dog poop.

There’s always the weather to mostly enjoy. Today was the first time the temperature dipped into the 70s since summer began. It’s a rare day we see rain, but this monsoon season seems to be one of the wettest that either of us can remember. While the humidity and mosquitos irk us, it seems like a small price to pay for what feels close to 365 days of perfect weather.

Finally, there are other people out here. There’s the guy who sets up the “school zone” signs and raises the flag at the grade school, a guy walking around with a golf club (for snakes, he says, but we think it is there for intimidation against the homeless who criss-cross our neighborhood and live in various hidden pockets near a greenbelt that runs through here), and another guy who seems uncomfortable passing others and will always move to the other side of the street and even change his course. We often encounter two Korean ladies out for an early morning walk, and sometimes, they are joined by two other people. There’s the friendly lady carrying a rosary and working it who many times stops to talk to dog walkers (or chat with us), the kids waiting at a couple of school bus stops, the trash truck drivers and various others moving through near the break of dawn.

How often does the average person tend to provide specific details regarding events that occurred more than a dozen years ago? This excavation of my own past has been my main task for the past few weeks as I reworked 30 old blog posts pertaining to travels taken from May 15, 2009, through October 17 of the same year.

I surely have explained elsewhere on my blog (or on the very indexes I’ve been creating to come up with a comprehensive list of all of our travels) that I’m repairing posts that were thin on photos and details when they were originally created. You see, back in the old days, bandwidth was at a premium, and nobody had time to wait for even five photos to download, so my posts reflected those limits. Consequently, with 1 to 3 photos per travel day, I would have compressed the events of the day into the 3 to 5 paragraphs that accompanied the images.

So, after our last adventure that saw us up in Williams, Arizona, for a weekend of hiking at the end of July and the fast-approaching date of Caroline’s bunionectomy, I turned my attention not just to caring for my invalid wife but also to my travel index. This index presents a bit of a challenge, though, because to select a single photo to represent a specific day, I need to be certain that I have the best one. All too often, my heart sinks when I review an old post and see its sole image or maybe the 2 or 3 that are there. Sure enough, I checked the photo directory of that date, and when I saw that I shot anywhere from 75 up to 1,000 photos, I groaned under the weight that there was a lot of visual information I had neglected.

I end up readjusting the old photos that accompanied the original posting and then get busy adding a bunch more. Regarding the 30 posts I worked on in the past few weeks, I ended up adding more than 600 photos from the archive, so we now have a better visual representation of the events of those days. But I can’t just add a bunch of photos without some explanation/narrative that accompanies each new image. In some instances, there was enough information in the compressed paragraphs detailing the majority of the day that I could pull inspiration from, while in some situations, such as our visit to Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, I had a lot of writing that had to be cared for.

That’s what I’ve been working on, and like my previous attempts to make progress on this massive undertaking, I have to take a break from the tedium. There’s a risk I fall into compulsive frantic attention to this task that is taking far longer than I ever imagined. At this point in the index, I’m on day 677, which is a measure of each day that we traveled away from Phoenix, Arizona, since August 9, 1999, and the commercial advent of digital photography when we were able to easily start cataloging our travels. By the way, this index does not include day trips.

Now, with about a couple of weeks before our next outing, I can turn my focus to other compulsive activities, such as some deeper reading and turning to my synth for some much-needed exploration.

All of the above photos were taken between May 15 and October 17, 2009. Over in the right column under “Other Pages,” you’ll find the links to the evolving index of “Our Travels.”

Their lives are changing, but they don’t know it yet. People count on consistency, repetition, and some certainty. And so it is when they’ve found a place that has allowed them to find some sense of community. The coffee shop I’m writing at today is closing in 23 days, but it’s not been announced yet, so some of the regulars are still in their routine with no sense of foreboding or knowledge that a month from now, many of them will no longer run into each other. I believe when they, too, learn of the closing, there will be a sense of mourning as a favorite morning stop is being taken off the map.

Inflation is the culprit, taking another victim that will be yet one more anonymous mom & pop operation to close on the march toward corporatized America. The division of wealth has created incredible hostilities between reality, comfort, and what some of us consider luxury. When private equity groups, millionaires, and billionaires are able to gobble up vast amounts of property and require them to have sizable returns to generate yet more wealth, they can take rents and valuations to whatever the market might bear. As for the disenfranchised public at large, they are a faceless victim that will either figure it out or land on the street; such is our take-no-prisoners style of business.

Regarding this coffee shop, the rent is going up, coffee prices are rising in part due to energy and transportation costs, finding basic supplies such as cups, lids, and even oatmeal grows more challenging, and all of this figures into the problems of finding employees that even if they were available, the employer has to remain aware that they are going to be pinched by an economy that will have them needing to demand more money.

Meanwhile, the laughter this place is accustomed to continues throughout the morning, and I’m acutely aware that this counter I’ve stood at for years will become a distant memory like so many other places I’ve frequented over the decades. Normally, I move away or encounter the locked door of a business that, from one day to the next, just quit. I’m sure that they, too, knew what was coming but couldn’t face the brutality of telling customers whose sympathies would make it just that much more heartbreaking to see their dream extinguished. Part of me wishes today that I didn’t know.

Until the owner makes the announcement, there will be no commiseration parties of solemnity over final cups of coffee; it’s business as usual…until it’s not.

Ask me tongue-in-cheek why I didn’t blog about your colonoscopy, and I’ll just go ahead and do just that. What kind of question was that coming from my wife? Really, you want the world to see the inside of your lower intestine? Fine, here it is.

Caroline was the first of us to go ahead and finally get a colonoscopy. I, on the other hand, have been leery, and it turns out that it was for no good reason. Well, let’s condition that because my idea of a colonoscopy came out of the ancient past where doctors, using something approaching the size of a thermos, required the patient be put under general anesthesia due to the trauma of having a giant tool shoved up your pooper, so they could look around trying to find the damage done by a poor diet. Then there were the stories I picked up before I was seven years old, where adults spoke about the horrors wrought by the laxatives and their foul taste. These scars have lasted a long time.

It turns out I was all wrong, at least as far as the procedure is concerned in 2021. This, though, begs the question, why didn’t one of my doctors ask me over these past eight years just what it was that was making me hesitant to have someone deep-diving past my rectum? Shouldn’t they have known that someone my age could have known of the process prior to modern medicine? Then again, I can also ask myself why didn’t I just Google it?

I have a great answer to that last question. Google any malady or medical procedure, and your ad stream automagically is transformed into a modern-day pharmacopeia where every corner of a webpage is there to encourage the reader to diagnose ailments and formulate strategies to deal with illness: poof, yer a doctor!

Well, it turns out that the device is no bigger than a finger and is able to probe the 5 feet of the colon without discomfort, but then again, what could be uncomfortable under the influence of propofol? This means that I can finally belly-up (or would that be “butt-up”?)  and get those nether regions beyond the b-hole checked out and photographed like Caroline’s seen above.

As for how did things look up, that squishy wet pink tube normally filled with creamy brown poop regarding my wife? She had one tiny polyp identified by item #3, a seriously small polyp, and doesn’t have to come in for a return visit for 5-10 years.

Finally, this is a milestone in my writing as while I’ve written about Oregon, Yellowstone, Europe, and other places many times, this is the first time I’ve ever noted anything at all about the interior of my wife’s bottom and for the casual reader, maybe you hope this is the last…until I write about my own.