I walk roughly the same loop most days, down to the corner, along the block with the bigger houses, back around past the small park with the bench nobody ever seems to sit on, and home. I’ve done this loop often enough that I mostly stop seeing it, the way you stop seeing your own furniture. This week I decided to actually pay attention and write down whatever I noticed each day, just to see what would turn up.
Monday
The bench in the little park had a fresh coat of paint, green, replacing what had been a chipped, faded blue for as long as I can remember. I have no idea who painted it or when, and nobody was around to ask. It seems like the kind of thing the city might do, though it also seems like exactly the kind of thing that would take the city years to get around to, so I’m not entirely sure.
Tuesday
A house two blocks over had a for sale sign go up overnight, one I hadn’t seen before, belonging to people I don’t think I’ve ever actually met despite passing their house probably a thousand times over the years. It made me realize how many houses on my regular route I could not tell you anything about, not the names of who lives there, not how long they’ve been there, nothing beyond the basic fact that the house exists and I walk past it.
Wednesday
I noticed the smell of someone’s dinner cooking as I passed a particular house, something with a lot of garlic in it, strong enough to reach the sidewalk, and it made me hungry in a way that stuck with me for the rest of the walk. I don’t know who lives there. I just know, now, that on Wednesdays, at least this one, they cook something with a lot of garlic, and I found myself oddly curious about what it was.
Thursday
Nothing, really. I want to be honest that not every day of this experiment turned up something notable. Thursday’s walk was just a walk, gray sky, nobody outside, nothing different from any other Thursday I couldn’t specifically account for. I almost didn’t write anything down at all, and then decided that not noticing anything was itself worth recording, since it tells you something about how most days actually go, uneventful, which is fine.
Friday
I saw Wanda out on her own short walk, further than she usually goes these days, and we ended up walking part of the loop together, slower than my usual pace, talking about nothing specific. It wasn’t planned. I just happened to catch her at the right moment, and the walk turned into something better than either of us expected from an ordinary Friday afternoon.
The Thing I Still Haven’t Figured Out
On both Tuesday and Friday, I noticed a small pile of stones stacked carefully on the low wall outside the park, three or four stones balanced on top of each other, the kind of deliberate arrangement that doesn’t happen by accident. I don’t know who’s making them or why. They weren’t there the week before, as far as I noticed, and they’ve shown up twice now in the same general spot. I’ve started to feel a small, low level curiosity about it that I don’t expect to resolve anytime soon, since I’m not about to stake out a park wall to catch whoever’s responsible.
What a Week of Paying Attention Actually Gave Me
I didn’t discover anything life changing by writing down what I noticed on my walks. A repainted bench, a for sale sign, a garlic smell, an uneventful Thursday, an unplanned walk with Wanda, and a small mystery involving stacked stones. None of it adds up to a grand insight. But I noticed more in five days of deliberate attention than I think I’d noticed in the previous several months of walking the same loop on autopilot, and that alone feels like it was worth the small effort of carrying a notebook in my pocket.
Next Week
I think I’ll keep doing this for a little while longer, at least until the stone mystery resolves itself one way or another. I’d like to know who’s building them. I’d also, honestly, be a little disappointed to find out. Some mysteries are better left as mysteries, even small ones on a low wall two blocks from my own front door.
The Second Week
I kept the notebook going a second week, mostly out of momentum, and the stones showed up again on Wednesday this time, a slightly taller stack than before, five stones instead of four, balanced in a way that seemed almost deliberately more ambitious than the earlier attempts. I stood there looking at it longer than I probably needed to, half expecting someone to walk by and claim credit, and nobody did.
I mentioned the stones to one of the Osei kids, thinking maybe it was them, and got an emphatic denial along with genuine curiosity about who else on the street might be doing it. We ended up walking past the wall together a few days later, both of us a little invested now in an unsolved question that affects absolutely nothing about either of our lives. That’s turned out to be one of the stranger, more enjoyable parts of paying closer attention this way, picking up small shared curiosities with people I wouldn’t otherwise have had a reason to discuss stacked rocks with at all.