Thoughts of the loop walk:

I am sitting in my favorite leather armchair with sun on my shoulder from one of the west facing windows of the living room. If I turn my head to the right, I can see one of the old maple trees between the house I rent and the South Street section of the Buxton loop. There are two adults and a child walking past the window and a car just drove by, but with the windows closed, I can hear nothing but the sound of the dehumidifier and the occasional cracking of a log in the wood stove.

If perception is based in our senses--in what we see, smell, taste, hear and feel, I think of cognition as what we do with those senses, as how we make sense of the information we've taken in through memory and reasoning and projection. As I sit in this chair, I know something of what is going on, on South Street and Buxton and West Street, without having to see it for myself. The Post Office is open and Liz, our post person, is at the counter or sitting in the corner at the computer. Her car is parked diagonally in the corner of the parking lot and the mail truck has just left with its 2:30 load. In a few minutes, some of the town's children will be getting off the school bus at the Green, and they'll sit beside the town clerk's office waiting to be picked up, or they will start walking home along South and West Streets. Parents will be driving to pick up their children at the elementary school and there will be a brief surge in the number of children's voices along the southern end of the property where this house sits, abutting the school road.

It is this knowing of the patterns of the place that makes it feel like home for me. I walked blindfolded on Buxton the other day because it was safer there with less car traffic and better sightlines for the few drivers. The sounds are more distinct because there is less traffic, and so I could hear the cars from West Street, the changing sounds of the river, the distinctly louder "plopping" of my friend's walking canes as we passed the blue ranch house at the end of Rodney's cornfield,and I knew where I was, even if I couldn't see. There was a breeze on my face as I walked beside the cornfield and I was hyper-aware of the ridge in the road though I kept listing to the left and had to be pulled back to the center of the road.

So as I navigate this landscape, there are landmarks--the blue ranch house with its chained Golden Retriever, the home of the couple who celebrated a 60th birthday earlier this summer with a klezmer band, the family that doesn't take care of its pets, and the house that belongs to the woman who has cared for the town's toddlers for 50 years. Across the cornfield is Rodney's farm--and so I still think of it, even though he turned it over to his son, Brian, two years ago.

These are social patterns that are part of my cognitive map, but there are physical landmarks as well. There is the house I wanted to buy, and even though I can not see the inside from where I walk, I know the crazy-quilt of wood pieces veneered into patterns on the stair landing and around the edges of the rooms on the first floor. There is the edge of West Street with its summer crop of poison parsnip and the barbed wire fence for the cows. I can hear the dog-map in my head--Janna's two springer spaniels just past the Four Corners, the baying of the hound behind the invisible fence, the coonhound a bit further down West Street , the herding dog at the farm. There's the hill on West Street where I have to walk my bicycle. There's the place near Fox Bridge where lightning struck the tree and split off 10 foot long sheets of bark, and that's near the place where the 20-something kid, still high on the last night's partying drove off the bridge and walked away, injured but alive. When I think of this place, I think in layers. That boy is dating the daughter of someone I used to work with who lives diagonally across the road from me. Now that the State has fixed the guard rail, the volunteer fire company has put in a hydrant. And I know the firefighter who was there painting it bright red. He stood there with his child who has the same name as his father. And it is where an old boyfriend caught some trout that we had for dinner, when everyone else said the water was too low and too warm.

When I walk on the bridge, I think of Rich and Richie and of the trauma of that time for the other family. This is part of what I see, and part of what I know.

The river is an edge that shapes the sounds I like here. The fact that the path is a loop means I don't have to backtrack over the same route to get back to where I started. There are subsidiary paths through the cemetery and a field, and past the schoolhouse so I don't have to walk on dusty, high-speed West Street. There's the library, the town clerk's office and the post office if I want to multi-task.

There is a multi-layered cognitive map here, of years spent, walking these roads. I used to live at the other end of West Street, but rarely walked here then, because I chose other routes that were less traveled, through the orchard to the West, and on my friend Ed's land. I knew more about animals then, those orange red newts, the woolly bear caterpillars, the prints of coy dogs in the muddy edges of the fields. Here, there are passing geese heading south and yesterday a deer that stood and watched as I passed, but this is not a place of animal lives. It is a place of people, and the hard work they do to earn a living--the farmer, the milk hauler, the deli that couldn't make it, the Lamplighter whose sign is now gone, and the boy who missed a turn and flew down the length of the river.

I will look forward to reading about your places....