I’m not quite sure where the recent walking obsession came from. It may have started with my evening jaunts to the fish market for dinner, or the lunchtime strolls down Penn. Ave.

Needless to say, I could have been walking to work the whole time I’ve been in D.C. proper. But I got a little too comfortable with the five minute commute that the car and the Cap. Hill parking pass afforded me, a much needed change from the year-and-a-half of sheer hell that was my commute from MD. So I slacked. For months.

It took a kind soul at work to offer their services as a walking companion (and a long string of gorgeous days) for me to reconsider this routine. So, to make a long story short, I’ve been walking to and from work for the last couple weeks.

Last Saturday, an odd thing happened. In the early morning, I woke up and glanced at the alarm clock and saw the semi-early hour (I think it was 8:00) and my brain, as it usually does on Saturday morning, instructed my body to roll over and fall back asleep. But this time my body vetoed my brain. All it wanted to do was go take a walk.

Next thing I knew I had made the drive up the Beltway to Great Falls Park, and was taking snapshots of nature as my legs propelled me forward on the trail next to the Potomac River.

That’s where a bird flying overhead, sharing my enthusiasm for texture and sepia tone, dropped something textured and sepia-toned of his own square in the middle of my forehead and all over my shirt.

The next Monday, I got caught in a downpour sans umbrella on my way home. Shit and raindrops keep falling on my head … but it’s no bother.

I tend to be keen to things I probably would never notice otherwise. Yesterday I snapped a pic of a horses grazing on a lot directly below the I-395 overpass, completely oblivious to the rumbling sound of the cars above.