The bookstore is three blocks from my apartment, which by any reasonable measure is not far enough to count as a walk worth writing about, and yet I’ve been doing this same three blocks on foot for close to six years now regardless of weather, regardless of whether I actually need anything, and I’ve started to notice I get a little unmoored on the weeks I skip it.

Asheville does this thing in late fall where the light comes in low and orange through gaps in the ridgeline for about twenty minutes before it’s actually dark, and the walk to Doreen’s happens to run east to west along a street with almost nothing blocking that light, so for about three weeks a year the whole three blocks turns into something genuinely worth leaving the house for. I’ve tried explaining this to people who aren’t from here and it never lands quite right, it’s twenty minutes, it’s not a hike, there’s no vista, it’s just a specific quality of light hitting a specific street at a specific time of year and somehow that’s enough.

Doreen has run the shop long enough that she holds things for me before they ever hit the general shelf, mostly nonfiction that overlaps with what I edit for a living, which she’s learned to spot faster than I expected a stranger to. I don’t always buy what she sets aside. Sometimes I just look at the stack and put most of it back, which she has never once seemed to mind, which is itself a small kindness I don’t think I’ve properly thanked her for.

What I actually think this walk is for, if I’m honest with myself, is the twenty minutes of not being at my desk and not being at my kitchen table either, the two places where I spend most of my actual attention marking things up. Walking to the shop is the one part of my week where I’m not editing anything, not even in my head, just moving through a specific kind of late-day light on a street I’ve walked probably a thousand times by now. I could drive it in under two minutes. I have never once driven it.

Winter makes it harder, obviously, the light’s gone earlier and the sidewalk ices over on the one stretch that never gets salted, and there are whole stretches of January where I skip the walk more weeks than I take it. I always notice. Not dramatically, nothing falls apart, I just get a specific kind of restless that I’ve come to recognize now as the shape of missing something small and stupid and completely unnecessary. Spring, when it finally comes back around, the first walk always feels a little like putting a book back on the correct shelf after it’s been sitting somewhere wrong for months.