The same route

"Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you." — 1 Peter 5:7

Biscuit and I walked this morning the same route we have walked for years. Down the driveway to the road, left past the Hendersons' fence where the forsythia finished blooming weeks ago, along the shoulder to the stop sign, and back. It takes twenty minutes. It used to take twelve.

He is slower than he was. I am slower than I was. We have arrived at this together without discussing it, which is the way most honest agreements are reached. He stops to smell whatever needs smelling and I stand there holding the leash and looking at the sky or the trees or the particular way the light falls on the road at seven in the morning, and neither of us is in a hurry.

When he was young he pulled. He pulled toward everything. Squirrels, other dogs, a plastic bag in a ditch. The whole world was urgent and he wanted all of it at once. I would brace myself and hold on and try to keep up, which is not a bad description of most of my forties. Now he walks beside me and sometimes behind me and the leash hangs loose between us like a suggestion rather than a restraint.

The route does not change. That is the thing about it. The same houses, the same mailboxes, the same bend in the road where the pavement cracks and the grass pushes through. I have seen it a thousand times and I could walk it with my eyes closed. But the morning is different every time. The light. The temperature. Whether the Hendersons' truck is in the driveway or gone. The bird that is singing or the bird that is not. The walk is the same and the morning is new, and I think that might be the whole trick of a daily practice. Not novelty. Faithfulness. Showing up to the familiar thing and finding out what it has for me today.

I carried a few things with me this morning. A bill I do not want to think about. A conversation I should have had with my brother last week and did not. The low-grade hum of worry that follows me around like a second dog, quieter than Biscuit but more persistent. I carried them down the driveway and along the road and by the time I got to the stop sign I was not carrying them anymore. I do not know where I set them down. Somewhere between the forsythia and the stop sign, the morning took them.

We were home by seven-thirty. Biscuit went to his water bowl and then to his rug. I sat down at the table.

Lord, thank you for the route that does not change and the morning that does.