Green and gold autumn sunshine, blue sky, a puff of cloud drift.  Perfect autumn day.  In a bit more than an hour I'll take Mikaela for a walk as I do every day.  Only now we are never alone.  The afternoon walk was my time of solitude surrounded by nature.  Now we are, as one woman coined it, a Wall of Women. 

It started with one woman, a friend up the road, an attendee of AITS.  We would meet occasionally and walk together.  It was great sometimes to have the company.  She is a woman who has lived an interesting life, who is living an interesting life, who has many strange things to share (but isn't every life a foreign land of exotic landscapes, strange frightening coastlines and unexplored forests?).  Then another AITS participant, hearing of our walk, asked if she could join us occasionally.  She drives over.  Then another woman who lives down the street, seeing the regularity of our walks, met us 'accidentally' while taking out her trash.  Now there are four of us and two more are invited. 

In this day of The Virus, more people are walking than ever before so we meet this and that neighbour, stop and have a chat or greet and pass on.  It's friendly and sociable and neighbourly at a time when these things are more important than ever.

But I am never alone!  I used to stop just to look at things; the view, a bug, a bird, the sky - often the sky - the way the light hits the leaves, and I could stand there as long as I liked, gaping, staring, listening communing with trees.  Mikaela didn't mind.  She would stand with me.    But now I walk and I talk or I walk and I listen and they are all lovely and we are all in this virus thing together and I feel slightly guilty that I wish for silence and solitude.  And for the buzzing busy-ness of society to just stop long enough to hear my own breath.