The cool evening breeze announced the arrival of the first autumn like weather. There was a smell of new mown grass in the air and the pavement had not yet cooled off from the sunny afternoon. I heard a train horn blowing in the distance. A dog barked as I walked past. I was alone with my thoughts.
Earlier in the day I had struggled with the details of a programming problem at work. I had been fully engaged by it for several hours. It finally melted under the withering gaze of my attention. I checked the fixed code in and headed for the car.
I was in the habit of taking a walk in the afternoon but my intense debugging session had kept me longer than I had intended. There was no time for a walk before I went home for supper. I would have to deal with that later.
I was greeted at the door by an enthusiastic puppy, an affectionate older dog, and my beautiful wife. I petted the dogs and kissed my wife and headed into the kitchen. I took a cheese pizza out of the oven and chopped some olives and sliced a fresh tomato to spice it up a bit.
After dinner, we watched television for a while and then I retired to write my blog. I knew I would have to get in my steps afterwards. I wrote for several paragraphs and decided that the topic I had chosen deserved more attention than I had to give to it today so I saved a draft of it and started again.
I found myself writing in that strange space between fiction and non-fiction. I was telling my story without revealing too much of the irrelevant details. It might just be something that someone would want to read. In any case it was something that I wanted to write. It came from the heart and that is the source of the best pieces, fictional or otherwise.
I breathed the night air in and finished the turn around the neighborhood. I hadn’t walked as far as I would have liked but I was a whole lot closer to my thirteen thousand steps than I had been before the walk. I would sleep well tonight.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.