John and I have started a new evening ritual of trying to take a walk, just as twilight is settling in. We've been pretty good about it for a week now, not every day but quite a few. Just time to clear our heads and talk about things that aren't work, bills, the band or the house.
It's been doing us a world of good.
Today, we also left work on time. ON TIME! Meaning BEFORE SIX! This is fantastic for us. With our drive home, we were home by 5:30 today. For the first time in years, when I haven't worked from home or left early, I am able to be at my house before six. It is now 6:14 and I am writing this blog, sitting on my couch, already having walked and dealt with the coming home ritual stuff (feed the cats, pick out some food for dinner). I'm finding this life, this new life here in St. Albans so incredibly easier to deal with than previous lives. So much healthier, for mind and body. Less time sitting in cars and more time walking in snow. More time drinking coffee at home and less time driving too fast to still be late to wherever I was going. Less time driving to the grocery store and trying to make do without ingredients that I forgot.
Also, we've noticed this bizarre phenomenon. Crows. Hundreds of crows. I'm not sure why they go for their evening flight right when we seem to be going for our walk, but there they are. Crowding the trees in the park, swooping over the church steeple, haunting the lamposts. There are so many of them. It is a murder of crows.
I just learned that. That a big group of crows is called a murder. It can also be called a muster or storytelling. I like that second one even better.
It is a mother effing storytelling of crows out there.
If the storytelling of crows were telling my story of St. Albans, it would end with, "And they lived happily ever after in the little yellow house with the big yellow cat, where they ate spaghetti and took baths and read books and laughed."
Amen.
