Josie at Sleep is for the Weak published this post on 19 April, 2011...
Kai and I walk the same walk almost every day. Our treks to town, to the park, to nursery, take us down the same pavements, half the time pounded by my power-walking buggy-pushing if we’re in a hurry, or dawdled over by little legs if we’re not.
There are days when the monotony of it makes me want to scream. I find myself almost desperate for a change of scene just now, new things to look at and be inspired by, tired out by the same old same old. I could vary the route I guess, but one wheely bin-lined street is an awful lot like an other, and invitably, often in a not-really-thinking state, my feet end up taking me along the same route on auto-pilot. I had this wish one day, as I walked head down, that I could somehow design shoes that left rainbow footprints as me and Kai trod and to bribe the council to let me turn their pavements into a strange map of art – footprints over footprints that meandered round puddles and pot holes and paused at all the myriad of strange little landmarks that make up mine and Kai’s trek. I reckon we’d paint the whole town in our wanderings – walking is something we do a lot of.
What makes me smile though, despite my own boredom of the same old sights, is how WONDERFUL Kai finds our daily route. He has always been a boy keen on routine and repetition. Like most toddlers it’s how he makes sense of his world, and walking the same way every day is a routine that he loves. It is like he has mental map now of the way, with a whole series of landmarks marked, punctuated with objects and occurrences he has collected from our repeated walkings. As we walk, or he rides in the buggy, each one needs to be pointed out as we pass, so that now our walk has become one giant, repeated story – a folktale for just the two of us, elaborated and growing and changing with every telling. Kai still communicates mostly with mime, odd half-right sounds and signs but it all makes sense to me. He tells me this story every day.
We pass the orange on the road, squashed flat now – Kai tells me how a car squished it and how he thinks the cats will like to eat it. We pass the rubbish in the gutter and a blue bag caught in a bush – Kai tells me that if everyone put their rubbish in the bin then the bin men could take it away (a brilliant system, I’m sure you’ll agree. Wonder if it will catch on?). We pass gravel spilt out from a drive-way onto the road and Kai reminds me that he thinks Nana should come with her broom to sweep it up. Sometimes new things appear and are added to his story – crisps on the road today prompted a five minute stop as he wondered how they had got there. Sometimes things change – a container of grit had toppled and spilt prompting Kai telling me every morning for a week that a man needed to come with a digger and crane to sort it out, which, to his immense excitement this morning, HE HAD! something I imagine he will remind me of every day for another week.
Everything is WOW. Everything is meaningful and pause for thought and conversation. And when I’m tired or in a rush, I’ll be honest, sometimes it is exasperating and tiring and I just want to GET ON and not have yet another conversation about the yellow truck.
But then he’ll come out with a new story, or notice something different and I can’t help but be swept out of my humdrum into a world of dinosaurs and speeding cars and snails that are looking for their mummies. His imagination seems to grow every week and so his stories are getting more and more inventive. I got him to tell you his latest one, the one he’s been telling me every day since last week – it’s on the video at the bottom.
The route may be the same every time, but he is not. And I’m beginning to think that will keep me going till I get my much longed-for change of scene.
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