I am still recovering. Hello, it wasn't like I was hit by a bus. But lunch breaks turn into two-hour naps with clammy feet and a puppy curled behind the legs.

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Yesterday, horses greeted me on my first country walk. A big dappled grey mare let me touch her nose, solid and warm under my awestruck city girl's hand.

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After a furious argument with my husband, I started Lauren Elkin's Flaneuse. As she recounts her university days walking the streets of Paris, I recalled wandering cities—Paris too, London, Tangiers, Marrakesh, Barcelona, Toronto, New York, New Orleans, Berlin, more, their names like stars glittering in the dark firmament of a middle-aged woman's memory. In those days, I was broke and tired and sore, but still urgent with desire and curiosity, skulking about alleys and cafes, scribbling notes on everything seen and heard and felt, finding inspiration in libraries and bookshops, in the cinema that is any street. It's been nearly a decade since those citywalking days. Well, two years since I left Galway, but Galway is small and so familiar after 7 or so years. My notes from my 20s are cryptic now, decipherable only by a leap back in time. Oh for anonymity ... a wee break from my conforming small-town self ... the chance encounter that changes a fate.

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