The rule of the fourth Saturday
A small ritual we made up in February that has so far survived contact with our actual lives.
Earlier this year we made a rule, slightly as a joke: on the fourth Saturday of every month, we go somewhere new in our own town. Doesn't have to be far. Doesn't have to be impressive. The only requirement is that neither of us has been there before.
In February we went to a coffee shop on the south end that turned out to be exactly the kind of place we'd been looking for and somehow had never noticed. In March we walked the cemetery on the hill behind the high school, which is much older and stranger than either of us expected, and we read every legible stone we passed.
April — yesterday — was a small park behind a strip mall that has a creek running through it. We sat on a bench for an hour and watched a heron that absolutely did not care that we were there. It was the kind of Saturday that resets the next week's nervous system.
The rule survives. We'll see how it does in July.
— Blake & Kayla