Steps

Before I enter my home & before I go to bed. When I first wake up and when I leave my house. When I was in college & lived in an apartment. At the High Museum, Field museum & at the beach. At national parks & national monuments. At the doctors office & the hospital. In cemetaries & at the church. On houses and sheds. Inside & out. Old & new. In the yard & in the den. Metal and stone. Concrete &wood. For form & for function. Leading up & leading down. Leading in & leading out.
In my life, in my head, in my world and probably yours too. Steps. Countless steps.

In the wee hours of the night, when all else are seemingly asleep, I'll silently slip outside. I sit on my front steps. In the spring I hear a beautiful middle of the night songbird...maybe a nightengale. In the summer, I can hear the owl from one of the oak trees overhead & i can sneak a peek at a neighborhood kid sneaking out. Almost always, I can hear the bats in the old oak trees & a train off in the near distance. I watch the cats slink up to steal a sip of water from my pond, totally unaware of my presence. Ocassionally, I may see a shooting star... which always makes me feel a little blessed to have even caught a glimpse of it.
Outside in the wee hours of the night, I sit on the front steps & contemplate life...big things & little things... time...people...places...sounds... smells...silence & how loud it can be. Feeling antsy, I scoot down one more step. I hear another human being from the distance & I scoot back up. In the dark of the night & early morning, just sitting on the steps... taking it all in.