January Song 🎧

It’s a dreary Sunday morning, fog and a white-gray sky making the warm temperature seem contradictory. Thankfully, there’s an intermittent breeze, light and cool enough to be comfortable as Gigi and I head out for our regular walk.

Sometimes we go through the apartments across the street from our home. She loves this because there are opportunities for dog sightings. I give her a chance before we head to the main event (a shopping plaza) that never has dogs.

I am nosy and look into everyone’s patio or balcony. I can’t help myself; I adore picturing other people’s lives. A first-level patio must have attempted beer pong the night before. Two sets of red solo cups are perfectly aligned into triangles on one table. The patio is too cramped for optimal drunk playing, and they realized it because it’s far too neat looking to have been played well.

I notice the neighbors to the right of them. Were they kept awake from this possible party? Two wicker chairs with floral-patterned cushions, a bistro table with a fake plant on top. Gigi spots two cats beneath the table before I do. Wide-eyed darlings, staring inquisitively and sweetly at us as we continue.

I lead us to the plaza. I watch her gait more than I watch anything else, her body so small and so active. Delighted as I am by the movement. Her silky coat sweeping back in the wind, ears tucked and precious. “She looks like a little mop,” a man once said as we trotted by.

Everything feels ghost-like because of the fog. The backlit sign of a restaurant’s name against white walls looks inviting. I pretend I’ll be back for a drink later, but I won’t.

The corner hair salon that decorates for every holiday and season has paper-cut red hearts everywhere. The LED lights behind rows and rows of hair products make the silhouettes of bottles and tubes look artistic.

My favorite wine bar still has hand-painted Christmas drawings on its windows, not yet wiped down. A wine glass framed with holly. I imagine the owner still liking it as much as I do.

Cigarette butts and trash from the night before litter the paths we wind through because maintenance doesn’t work on Sundays. I make up stories in my head about who shared these moments before they left their mess.

We head to what I call the back lots. There’s a bigger brick building for office workers on the other side. I love this part because there are cobblestones with moss growing on them that frame the entrance of the building. Someone recently had it power-washed, though, so it’s a little less charming.

I look up at tall palm trees with brown fronds that haven’t yet been yanked down by landscapers. My eyes instinctively move up when it’s windy in this spot, because of the tap, tap, tap of the flagpoles (three total: two Florida state flags and one US flag in the center, still at half-mast to honor the late President Jimmy Carter).

I can smell cigarette smoke from a woman who lives in the apartments as we make our way back toward the direction of our home. She habitually sits on a curb, watching videos on her phone with her knees tucked up to her chest and the cigarette dangling from her finger as it holds the screen.

I haven’t been listening to music much when we walk lately, but today I have a song on repeat, and I decide it will be my song for January.

I make faces out of the bumps that are scattered along the trunks of Laurel Oak trees as we walk by them while Gigi stalks squirrels.

^{(Daily Writing 006)}