I take Princess Amy for a walk on sunny mornings in hopes of lifting her mood and getting the day off on the right path. If you're one of the many that hang out here on the Circular Journey blog site and read everything that I write, then you're familiar with the princess. Otherwise, it may suffice to say that Princess Amy is my limbic system and it behaves like the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass. If you're still lost, then I suggest that you stop reading now and return to your social media habit.
On this morning's walk I was contemplating the characters in my book--the novel, not the South Carolina travel book. I was thinking specifically of Lupe, the 14 year-old protagonist who causes all the rannygazoo in Crystal Cove.
As I walked underneath the arbor of a pine grove, I was startled when a pine cone fell from its moorings in the canopy at just the precise moment to strike its target on the very top of my head. Pine cones are harder than you might expect this one fell from high above and landed with a jarring Whack!. I jumped. I may have shouted something like, Holy Hell! Tears came to the eyes.
Immediately after such an attack the eyes are drawn upward to see where the attack originated and this morning I saw a bird, possibly a grackle, fly from somewhere high in the tree. A new spirit guide I wondered. The thought was prompted by my musing on the character Lupe. Her mother is Native American--Lupe prefers the word Indian--and she recognizes spirit guides from the animal kingdom and insists that I have one too, even though I haven't been properly introduced.
But I'm in danger of jumping the rails in the story. Let's get back to the subject by saying that when I brought my gaze back down to earth, I almost stepped on a card lying on the ground. At first I continued walking but quickly thought better of it.
You see, the pine cone barrage was a bit out of the usual and considering the odds that a bird would dislodge the whatsit at just the right time to have it fall through the ether and smack me on the shoulder must be staggering. And if you consider the spirit guide angle, it follows that maybe it all happened for a reason and the card, which turned out to be a lottery card, could be the reason.
You understand then why I picked up the card. Unfortunately, it wasn't a winner. Now I was left wondering, Why? Realizing that there was no answer better than the whole thing being nothing more than a random happenstance, my thoughts quickly turned to germs. We think of germs a lot during a global pandemic and I was holding a card that had been in someone else's hands.
There was no trash can in sight and I didn't want to carry this piece of garbage for the rest of my walk. But the on-going environmental degradation has made me militantly anti-littering. What to do? That became the big question in my mind. What to do with the discarded paper.
I'm interested to know if you agree with my decision, which was this: The damage to the environment and all right-thinking sensibilities had already been done by the person who dropped the card in the first place. If I placed the card on the path exactly where I found it, then I was doing no further damage and I could pick up the card and dispose of it properly on my return.
I walked back underneath the same tree and placed the card on the ground. Then I straightened and continued my stroll.
"You dropped something."
That's right. Another hiker was approaching on the path and she'd seen my deliberately placing the piece of trash on the ground. Of course, I wanted to say, It's not mine. I'm only returning it to where I found it.
I didn't want to pick up the trash again and go through the same deliberations. What I actually said was: "Thank you."
Then I picked up the card, smiled as her as she walked past--it did not good, of course, I was wearing a mask--and then I walked on. I placed the card in the back pocked of my jeans and forgot about it until I washed the jeans with the card still in the pocket.