Out the door, down the driveway slope I go, and turning right, stride forward down the street. I look from side to side until I reach the T intersection at the corner. Here’s the decision point: turn left, downhill? Or go right, up the hill to points west including my favorite Eucalyptus Walk? A happy decision whichever I choose. And sooner or later, if it hasn’t already happened, something will meet my eye and I’ll grab my camera out of my fanny pack and start really seeing.

I walk an area of terraced hillsides north of San Diego. No grand or fancy place, my comfortable neighborhood includes several suburban roads’ worth of comfortable, low-slung tract houses from 1960; they hug the land, along with mature plantings and trees, especially succulents. I live on one of several single-block cul de sacs.

I walk to walk. I don’t listen to music on earbuds nor talk on my cell phone unless forced to for business reasons. I want to be in the place and see and sense everything that I can. With each step, I become more deeply rooted. Knowing my neighborhood is a way of living I’ve depended upon all my life—and is a vital piece of who I am.

Though I don’t consciously use it, I live with an internal map rather like Christopher Robin’s in Winnie the Pooh, as imagined by Ernest Shepherd.  However, I don’t go so far as to identify the points of the compass by my name, as Pooh does!

Nor do I keep stuffed animals’ lairs as landmarks, and my paths are defined by street names. Yet like Christopher Robin, I, always start from “My House.” Several of my notable locations are tree-based, too: stands of paperbark eucalyptus, for instance, or the ornamental fruit trees whose seasons I follow.  Other landmarks are gardens I identify by their creators or friends I’ve visited. There’s also “the house with the lawn chair on the roof,” so named because back in early Covid times, someone fearful sat up there when neighbors gathered across the street for a safe, distanced once-a-week sing. (I privately suspect this “someone” of being a bit antisocial and even somewhat sympathize with her/his desire to watch everything going on, from “above it all.” I’ve never yet seen anyone using the chair, either.)

This is hardly the first neighborhood of my life, though. After a foggy early memory of a rectangular fenced yard with trees on either side (from my toddler years), I clearly remember our street in the leafy Boston suburb of Auburndale, where I lived in my grandmother’s house from ages five to eleven. I can still precisely map that place: backyard by backyard, house by house, tree by tree upheaving the sidewalks.

Then followed a beneficent seven years of living on three acres in Eastham on Cape Cod; there the land took its meaning for me from the freshwater pond on which our summer rental cottages were located. Unconsciously I thought of what I was exploring as entirely my property.

I’ve also come to think of interiors, both houses and shared buildings, as neighborhoods; I can still map my grandmother’s house itself, or the three floors of the New England Conservatory of Music main building in Boston, or the Buffington “cottage” on Cape Cod that I visited so many summers. These “building memories” are compounded of people and architecture, inseparable from one another; I also sometimes retrace Boston itself from those college years, the first urban street neighborhood I ever walked.

But my focus now is on outdoor neighborhoods. And I’ve come to feel most grounded, and happy when over time I can grow into the places around me. To me, walking means muttering, exploring, skulking in bushes, finding paths, naming (even unconsciously), and returning over and over, claiming my ‘hood.’ I check out puddles, gutters, and all the amazing deposits in them, and reflections and leaves whose colors are intensified by water. Oh, and garden clippings—you may come upon me leaning over a barrel with my camera.

As I move, the camera moves, too, from its nest in my palm into position with index finger ready on the shutter to click images into life. I gaze at birds on wires, the stained-glass cutouts of autumn leaves, or trace the kanji of branches against the sky.

Wherever or however I look, however far I go, every time I step out the front door and into the natural world, I find a great well of intense beauty. Whether I’ve looked a hundred times or a thousand, or see something newly planted or a fresh bloom, the cross-section of a cut-back succulent, color and sculpture, shape, moisture (or the lack of it), are everywhere around me, and I am newly enriched every time.

This is the first of several blog entries on this theme. I’d love to show you what excites me! So please join me for some walks around my neighborhood, and keep reading and looking for the next several months.