I just returned from a walk to Glen Canyon. My fingers are numb with cold, I can barely type!

This is some of what I saw and experienced. (Someone else on the same walk might have noticed totally different things.)

One of those trees with the bumpy lumpy bark.

A thin man with a beard speaking from within a small crowd at Bird and Beckett Books.

Cold gusty breeze.

A geranium-like flower with bright gold petals.

Two red-tailed hawks soaring together, weaving together and away, together and away.

A small park with a circular path. I walked several times around what looked to be a soccer team of 3 and 4 year olds, and a lot of people with dogs and balls and clear plastic bags of dogshit. A woman fiercely boxing in the air while her daughter rode a pink bicycle. A portly man in black coat and hat sitting focused in on himself. A couple on a bench. I heard the phrase ‘when we do our wills’ rise from the man as I passed. The woman looked extremely tense.

I walked a few times the other direction too, with what felt like a totally different view, same path.

The woman now smiling, no longer boxing, exiting the park with her daughter riding alongside.

The couple sitting and talking more comfortably.

The sun dropping below a hillside. The bench now empty.

Another red-tailed hawk, and a smaller, striking-colored, red-shouldered hawk.

A hawk ahead still in sunlight perched in the tree where I earlier searched for some small birds I’d seen in flight. The hawk looked at me, and away, and after a couple minutes, took flight pausing over my head twice, I guess to check me out. It was a red-tailed hawk. A couple jogged by and the man asked, was that a golden eagle?

I thought about the two golden eagles I’d seen while driving through Arizona. I thought about the bald eagle that had appeared above the snow in the sunlight, something I experienced as extraordinary as I approached Flagstaff from the south.

I saw a tall, thin, dark-haired boy in black and green doing sprints in one of the baseball diamonds at Glen Park. His fierce sprinting so fascinating, I bypassed Chenery and took Paradise instead a block farther.

A little girl perched in the open back end of a vehicle, waiting for her dad to finish seat-belting her brother.

License plates and signs on a fence. White roses and other tiny white flowers with oranges and limes dangling from branchesbehind them. The roses smelled divine.

A small bumpersticker that said “I …” and there was a sea turtle with a red heart on its back. There was a JFK quote in mosaic on a church, saying something about doing God’s work on earth. Inside the church building, I saw people playing fierce ping-pong, and behind them a white silhouette of an eagle on the wall.

The voices of boys approaching me from behind. Three guys around age 15, one carrying a skateboard, passed me up. I smelled that pungent end-of-the-day boy smell as they went by, and wished I had a warm-lit kitchen table where I could serve them spaghetti.

A bright yellow taxi next to bright yellow pavement segments. A red vespa, a shiny silver vespa.

A group called Passage to India playing jazz at Bird and Beckett.

A blue plush elephant dangling from a stroller.

A washeteria that looks cleaner than the one I usually go to.

A friend drinking a beer in a brown bag in the shrubbery.

The triangle of earth on College Avenue that was trashed out two years ago and is now clean-churned earth waiting to be seeded.

How happy I am to be back.