Women Walking

By the third year of the pandemic, I was lonely. I wasn’t seeing most of the friends I made when I moved from Cleveland to Portland thirteen years ago; I hardly saw anyone for more than a few minutes except my partner. That was fine at the beginning of the shutdown—our relationship was still pretty new, and the shared isolation gave us plenty of time for book talk and cribbage and gardening and birding and binged shows and cooking and dog devotion. And I was finishing a book, hunkered over a desk at home, and didn’t have a lot of social impetus anyway. But after a few years, I was pining for the sorts of small gatherings, mostly with women, that had disappeared along with in-theater movies and choral singing. 

“I feel like I’ve lost all my friends!” I sighed to my daughter.

An especially wise and thoughtful social worker, she said, “Mom, we all feel that way.”

I decided to broaden my circle. But how, since I hardly went anywhere or did anything that allowed me to meet new people? And how to meet people my age in the extravagantly youthful city of Portland? I had first observed the age imbalance years ago, visiting my daughter, when she was trying to entice me to move here. “Where do they make the people over fifty live?” I asked as we drove down one street after another, all filled with configurations of the young. 

In late 2022, I decided to revisit the Nextdoor site for my neighborhood. I had mostly stayed away because the posts scared me (thieves! men exposing themselves!) or frustrated me (the millionth squabble about homelessness) or just annoyed me (strangers staring at their houses! I wanted to tell them that that could have been me a few years ago, wondering if their paint color was Sherwin-Williams’ Deep Sea Dive or Benjamin Moore’s Midsummer Night). I usually only logged in to offer strangers the excess persimmons from my tree or old issues of the New Yorker. But what if I invited strangers for a daily walk?

So I proposed a time to meet in front of a nearby coffee house. Rather quickly, a group of women coalesced. (Only one man came that whole first year; he and I tromped gamely through a cold rain with his flawlessly obedient dog and never saw each other again.)

Nearly two and a half years later, I have a list of over thirty women on my phone, and every morning I send a text asking who plans to walk. There is almost always a daily gathering, with two to twelve of us. Unless someone has a specific destination—a flowering witch hazel that must be revisited or a yard sale or a new ostentation of metal sculptures—we make an ad hoc decision about which direction we will take. Maybe up the hill to the east, where we have wandered so pleasurably before. Or west toward the Willamette River and then along the path between the science museum and the water, with its views of morning scullers and cormorants. We might go south toward an older part of the city, crossing several busy streets to stare into the windows of a fabulous German sausage shop. Or toward the pioneer cemetery to the north, with old headstones shaped like tree stumps erected by the Woodmen of the World. 

I always feel as if we’re carving a new little groove with every walk—drawn down one street by a glimpsed mural on the side of a building, bypassing another street where a new mushrooming of tents has narrowed the sidewalk, beguiled to another by a trail of blossoms someone arranged on a stone wall—and then often discover that we have been this way before. Part of the pleasure every day is getting slightly lost— distracted by the visual changes of the passing seasons and the conversations that sometimes make us lose track of where we are—and then found, in our more intimate familiarity with the larger neighborhood.  

Once, we were admiring a huge old house of Moorish design when the owner came out and asked, “Why are you hanging around?” Then he invited us in to see how he has carved the house into five apartments, including a modest one for himself, and to talk about how sad he’s been since his wife died. We have stopped frequently in front of a tiny exquisite Victorian with bountiful curlicues and architectural gewgaws. Once the owner saw us lingering on his sidewalk and invited us to the back yard to look at the crinkle-crankle wall—curved like a snake—that he made out of brick. And once, we were peering into the garden of a Chinese Buddhist temple when a woman opened the temple door and waved us in. The building opened in 1926 as a Christian Science church and is now retrofitted with a red and yellow façade sparked with gilded characters, huge stone guardian lions flanking the stairs. Despite the spectacle of all that, we weren’t prepared for the opulence inside: rooms of giant gold-layered statues and carved stone columns and enormous metal bells and silk-wrapped books and carved altars and beautifully embroidered streamers and lanterns. The woman who invited us in was a new volunteer, new to the temple and new to Portland and even newish to the United States. Maybe she was as lonely as I was when I wrote my post on Nextdoor. 

When the group first started, we exchanged basic information politely, but as the miles and hours have accumulated—up to two hours of walking, talking, and gawking—we have learned so much more about each other. One has a garden I’ve admired for years and knows the highlights of all the other gardens in our part of town. One has owned up to three retired greyhounds at a time, and her current pup can’t be bothered to stir for a morning walk until around ten. One’s many-greats grandfather built a house for Harriet Tubman. Another sings and dances at Buddhist festivals. There’s a fierce union activist, and someone who grew up in a commune. They’re all fascinating to me in perfectly ordinary ways, too. We don’t know each other’s exact ages, but most are able to lollygag like this because we are retired or semi-retired. A handful are younger but work from home or are between jobs. Those who were reserved when they joined are more talkative now. Those who walked slowly months ago are faster. 

When we first started walking, we were what the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter called weak ties—people who have a slight connection but are not close. Granovetter argued that weak ties bring us a flush of new ideas and experiences that our close ties cannot, as we often live in the same bubble as our best friends. And that’s been true of our walking group as we nudge each other into new interests—cooking for the neighborhood homeless village, discovering new-to-us artists and authors, signing up for historic tours, bestowing our patronage on wobbly neighborhood businesses. 

Now, the weak ties have become strong. We know each other well enough to track the grandchild in her first year of college; the husband starting chemo and the other husband recovering from a hip replacement; and the ongoing struggles of an aging mother-in-law, an overwhelmed daughter, a disabled son. Our yards branch and bloom with generous plants from each other’s gardens.

Several times, this has happened: We’ll be walking along, talking and laughing and inspecting someone’s lilies and waving at their cat, and someone else will shout from across the street and ask if we are a group. Yes, we’ll say. Want to join?

And they do.

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