He stepped from his doorway and was met with the warm feeling of morning sunshine. He bent over to adjust his shoelaces. He descended the front porch steps onto the cracked, dirtied but very familiar sidewalk. From above, the sun coming through the trees cast the light into tiles as if it were converting the sidewalk into his kitchen floor. A slight breeze tousled his hair and left a secret in his ear.
As he fell into a slow sauntering pace, the sound of squirrels munching on acorns came from unidentifiable places. He let his eyes wander for a second as he slowed, searching for the source of noise. When he retired his hope of finding it he saw the curled silvery gray hair of the old lady rocking in her southern style porch swing reading Anna Karenina. She looked up from her book and raised a hand to gesture a kind salutation, no different from any other morning. Her calm disposition and serene smile was a shroud to her failing memories.
The chap continued on his way, letting his feet carry him along. A small white pamphlet flittered across his shoe. He bent down to inspect the bleeding ink. It was a lost dog poster. The words on it read, "Small, brown, and affectionate. Have you seen her?" Then as the wind had brought it, it took it away, riding on the breeze that rumpled his hair. Whispered in his ear. He issued a sigh and rocketed a black walnut into the street with a sharp kick. It shattered in the road, opened, and spilled its contents onto the warming asphalt. "The temperature is now 76 degrees with a high coming midday of 89," said a passing car's radio. Simultaneously he wiped a forming bead of sweat from his brow.
To his right, lay a broken and battered shoddy recliner ready to be whisked away by a garbage truck. He pictured the size of the man that had created the trash out of what had once probably been a nice piece of furniture. For a spilt second he thought about testing out it's stability when a baby blue robin's egg caught the attention of his eye. It solitarily lay cracked and abandoned on the sidewalk. He gently scooped it up and it lay peacefully in the palm of his calloused hand. The moment lasted until it was tossed over his shoulder and further mangled when it landed back on the concrete.
About 9 paces ahead a mural came into view, the two presidential candidates faced each other. The wall was covered with meticulously painted graffiti covering the roughly textured chipped, red schoolhouse, bricks. The boy stopped, and let his blue eyes follow the flow of bricks that had stories painted all over them. Like everything around him, there are stories to tell while others are already being told. Scenarios being peeled away from their fixtures. He turned on his heel, took a right, and emerged from his canopy of trees, his street, his sidewalk, his story, onto the main road where lines were being written as he walked, where the paths were unfamiliar. He left the breeze behind as he continued on his way.
