Into the Park

I slept until 9, but didn't get out to doing the laundry until quarter of 12! Good thing I only had a very small load today. It was so small, I put it in for less time than I usually do in the dryer and it was fine. I was also helped by the laundromat being surprisingly quiet for a Monday late morning-early afternoon. There was a couple of women doing their laundry and the owner, but everything wasn't full to capacity.

After I took my laundry home and put it away, I had a nice lunch of leftover Lemon Thyme Chicken, stir-fried vegetables, and spinach salad with strawberries and peanuts. Ran Robin Hood while eating lunch. Honestly, I found it a bit dull. While it made more sense (and had more sense of the time period) than the weird 1991 version, they may have gone a little TOO dark.

I spent my time at the laundromat reading A Weekend To Change Your Life, by Joan Anderson. It discusses a woman who had retreated to Cape Cod for a year to "find" herself after being all things to all people. Now, I'm not married and have no children, so I have a much easier time retreating than most people do. I spent a lot of my childhood just taking random walks by the ocean, picking up sea glass or "Cape May Diamonds" (wave-buffered quartz), watching boats on the horizon or admiring paintings artists would make of the landscape. I repeated these long walks when I moved to Wildwood. I would hike all the way down to North Wildwood in the summer and stroll among the tide pools there.

The woman now holds weekend retreats in Cape Cod for women who want to "retreat" and find themselves as well. As I thought about it, I realized I didn't need to run off to the sea to lose myself in nature. I lived right next door to nature! One of my neighbors is a park! I pulled on my coat and went for a walk.

Actually, it was more like a climb. I decided to explore the wild, rugged cliff-side in the backyard and that lead to the park. You can climb right up the hill and be in the park without actually going through the entrance.

It was cloudy this morning, but the sun came out when I was in the laundromat, though it remains chilly. It warmed my back and made the greenish waters of the river sparkle. I hiked down to the cliff, then around the ubiquitous green sticker bushes and spindly small trees. Most of the trees here have buds, but it'll probably be a few weeks before we see actual leaves.

I kept seeing those green sticker bushes everywhere as I hiked up the hill. When I carefully took hold of one to inspect it, I realized it wasn't a bush. It was a vine - a clinging vine, like the ones Miss Ellie taught me to pull away from the holly trees last fall. Only, unlike the vines we removed from the holly, these vines had thorns that were sharp and able to catch onto anything.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much of a metaphor those vines were. I'd been clinging to so many things, so many outdated notions and old ideas. I may not have had anyone clinging to me, like the women who went on that retreat, but I was doing a fair bit of clinging myself. I wanted to be free of things that clinged...including those with thorns that held on.

I kept seeing those vines EVERYWHERE as I kept hiking around the perimeter of the park. The seemed to grow around every tree and bush, choking them and blocking out the light. I'd never noticed them before, but with the leaves and the snow gone, there was nothing hiding them. I rarely walk around the edges of the park, fearing falling in or getting hurt. I wanted to see everything.

I noticed with disgust how much trash was in the park, too. Doesn't anyone in Oaklyn know how to use a trash can? There were beer cans, bottles, and packs, WaWa iced tea bottles, plastic grocery bags, and flattened milk and water jugs. I wonder if there's a way to suggest a trash clean-up in the park for the local schools. Someone has to teach the kids to respect nature.

I hugged that big tree on the southern edge that has been spray-painted, though. I feel as disrespected by my customers as that tree is by half the teenagers in Camden County. Why do people treat people - and trees - this way? How hard is it to learn to be kind to one another and the world around us?

I finally found one tree on the other side of the park that wasn't covered in sticker vines. It was a wide behemoth that already had huge pale green buds on it. The taller, skinnier trees behind it were smothered by vines, but they barely touched the big tree.

I found myself wanting to be more like that tree. I wanted to be strong and flourishing, with nothing clinging to me. That tree showed me that skinny and tall don't always mean you avoid the clinging vines.

I thought about the vines and the trees for the rest of the afternoon, even when I was at work. It was more interesting than work. Work was steady for the night, fairly busy but not quite as bad as this weekend. There were no major problems, and I was able to go straight home.

On my way back to my apartment, I saw flashing lights on West Clinton Avenue. Curious, I rode down there to check them out. All I saw were fire trucks gathered on various streets and lots. Nothing seemed to be on fire, though, and there was no smoke or puddles of streaming water from hoses. I couldn't figure it out.

(I finally discovered online at the Weather Channel that there was a fire weather watch and a red flag warning, though it has since expired. Although I don't know why they were on West Clinton. Maybe practicing?)