Little scenes from life too easy to drive past

To keep the knees from screaming, I've adopted a simple exercise schedule: Day 1, I run; Day Two, hit the bike; Day Three, I walk.

The first Day Three arrived yesterday, so I meandered across Clintonville at a brisk power-walking pace that carried me home just after dark. An hour after I returned home, I might as well have walked in mud.

Aside from restoring the soreness to my legs, I grasped a lot of detail that would have escaped me had I driven through the same stretch and only exercised my driving foot.

Charter school children trying to raise cash from commuters (okay, they were coming up to cars at the red light; that I would have noticed).

A glut of historic markers, so weathered and barely legible that they're footnotes threatened to vanish beneath the elements.

An overgrown path through a small woods where two streets terminated and the city never bothered to connect them, so pedestrians did anyway.

A little boardwalk leading down into one of the major ravines, sparing walkers from the steep, winding road cars whip down.

But the one that caught me the most was a familiar building with its busiest hours in the evening. I spotted someone else's family and friends hugging outside the funeral parlor, headed inside for a wake.

By the time I doubled back, the cars were streaming away from its lot, away from an inherently melancholy place.