Living in a downtown apartment, I don’t get as much time in nature as I would like. I feel it every time I’m outside the city. It’s one of the trade-offs I’ve made for this season of my life. Right now I prioritize walking and being close to activities. That probably won’t be the case forever. Anyway, I did something that many would consider crazy on Sunday, something that I myself would have considered crazy during most other seasons of my life. I went on a short hike with the primary purpose of being able to listen to the buzz of the cicadas. I had heard them during my Saturday activities and wanted to clear my head a little, so I drove about 20 minutes north to a lovely little park with a few hiking trails leading down to a riverbank. I’d been there before, but this time I took the longer loop trail for a pleasant afternoon stroll away from most of the other people who had similar ideas.

For anyone who hasn’t heard the cicadas in a while, the sound was not like that of a rainforest as one might imagine; it’s much too monotone even if the volume got close and there were occasional bird sounds to act as treble against the bass of the insects. Early May here also lacks the humidity of a rainforest, but that will set in soon enough as we move towards summer. I lingered on a bench at the riverbank for several minutes overlooking a tiny rapid thinking a lot about what should come next. Then I got up in what passes for peaceful calm and walked back up and along the ridge to the parking lot. One the walk back, there was even an adult black snake that slithered across the trail in front of me. That was the largest wildlife I saw during the afternoon, but wildlife viewing wasn’t the purpose of this trip. No, the purpose of this trip was a seasonal sort of forest bathing.