Two Stops East, Four Hundred Geese

January twelfth. Here is what happened: Simone asked me last week, in the casual way she asks things that turn out to matter, whether I ever just got on a bus without knowing exactly where I was stopping. I said I had done something like that once. She said she felt like doing it Saturday. So we did.

We went east. Two stops past the stop I always use, into the neighborhood I had photographed in October and then again in November, the block with the dry cleaner's window, the blue awning, the street name I kept thinking about. I had not told Simone that was where we were going, partly because I didn't plan it that way and partly because she already knew the neighborhood. Grew up two streets over. She mentioned that a month ago at the end of a shift and I had written around it for weeks without being sure what I was writing toward. Turns out the answer was: this. A frozen reservoir I didn't know was there. A walking path with geese, I am not exaggerating when I say there were hundreds of them, utterly unconcerned with the temperature or us. Simone crouched down to look at the ice like she was going to find something in it, and I had my camera out before I had thought about it.

Simone's scientific investigation of the ice.

We ended up in a bakery afterward. Small place, good coffee, chairs that didn't match. Simone had an extended theory about the croissants that I will not reproduce here because she made me promise. We stayed longer than we meant to, the way you do when it's cold outside and the conversation keeps going.

Post-reservoir debrief. Simone had opinions about the pastry selection (good opinions).

At some point I realized that this was the thing I had been circling for months, not the photograph, not the block, not even the neighborhood, but this: that she had a geography I didn't know about, and I had already been to it with my camera, and none of that required any ceremony to become real. It just became real, on a Saturday, because we got on a bus.

I got home with cold feet and a full memory card. Gerald had grown another inch toward the window. Everything was exactly where I left it, and also something had shifted slightly, the way it does, without asking permission.