I got my love of walking from my Grandfather.  So many cherished childhood memories involve walking the neighborhood with him.  (My love of thunder and lightening storms comes from him as well.)

The most important thing my grandfather taught me about walking was to keep my head down, because sometimes you find money.

Except I walk in the woods now, so mostly I’m watching out for hazards, such as roots, rocks, branches, poop and sometimes animals.  I also have to keep my head up to watch for other people, dogs, spider webs and wild animals.  It’s a fine line trying to keep my head up as well as keeping my head down.  Many is the time I’ve tripped over a root or rock.

Some walks are better than others.  It’s just the nature of the beast.

Take last Friday for instance.  Sampson, Delilah and I had just stepped into the field and Delilah was sniff, sniff, sniffing around.  I can always tell when she’s about to dive into something and sure enough, “Eck!  Leave it!” I screamed just as she dropped.  Sometimes I can see what she’s rolled in, other times I can’t.  Unfortunately for me, this was one of those times when I could.  Actually I looked down and saw the frog’s legs.

Ewwwwww.

I normally rinse the dogs off after a walk but rolling in frog legs meant shampoo because there was no way she’s going in my house with dead frog all smushed in her fur.

Le sigh.

We walked around the field and headed into the woods, then I noticed something else had caught the attention of both dogs.  Looking down I saw a smashed bird egg, sadly I could see the little embryo of the bird still inside the egg.  (If you’re not grossed out by such things, you can see the photo of the egg here.  Just scroll down past the really cute photos of my dogs.)

This is turning out to be one of those walks I thought to myself as I bent down and gently scooped the egg up into a plastic baggie.

A bit further along, I’m pretty sure Sampson was about to eat something vile, so I “Eck! ecked” again and while I was busy distracting Delilah from the eck Sampson was busy investigating this.

I was fairly certain it was a box turtle, but I always worry about snappers so I turned to tell Sampson to “leave it.”  I was so busy trying to distract the dogs and keep them out of trouble, that I almost missed this.

There was a book of matches not too far from it, so I’m assuming that someone went into their pocket to pull out the matches to smoke a cigarette and must have dropped their money.  Serves them right for lighting a match in the woods. 😀

I figure it was the Universe’s way of telling me to relax a little and enjoy my surroundings.

A few minutes later, I noticed a couple of trees had begun to turn their spring coats to the glorious colors of fall.

Can you see it?  The way some of the leaves have turned  yellow?

My footsteps a little lighter, my heart a little happier I headed for home.