I love Autumn. It seems - after an interminable Indian Summer - that it is finally returned with temperatures more appropriate to October than July.

Yesterday afternoon I took a 2-hour walk through a large park just across the street from my home. I frequently walk here and I almost always take a pipe with me to smoke at my halfway point on a bench alongside a small creek called Four Mile Run.

It’s hard to beat time spent with a pipe and good tobacco alongside a quiet stream. The smell of Autumn leaves accompanied by the sight of honey-colored October light as it shoots downward through the forest canopy is nothing short of glorious. Since I almost always walk with my iPod and listen to great music (yesterday was Elgar’s Enigma Variations), my pipe is part of an overall sensual feast.

I’ve written here often about contemplation. It is a part of my life that I increasingly treasure, especially as I have worked my way up through my 50s. It is so easy to become a “human doing” as opposed to a “human being” these days. Busy-ness, even spent pointlessly, is over-valued in our culture. I really do think that if people spent more time in contemplation that their lives would be richer and that they would find themselves spending less time undoing damage they might not have otherwise done.

Yesterday, as I was sitting on this bench, an older woman - I’d say 75 or older - walked up to me and asked if she could share my bench. I scooted over, she sat down, and I returned to a closed-eye state, quietly puffing away on my reliable old Barling bulldog and mild English tobacco.

Her voice was a bit throaty when she suddenly spoke. I could hear an emotional undercurrent in her words. “I used to hate the smell of a pipe when my husband would smoke on the back porch and the smell would come through the window by the kitchen sink. My husband’s gone now and I would give anything to have him back - smell and all.”

I turned my head to look at her and saw one eye glistening and the other cloudy with a cataract. Her mouth quivered some. She reached out, grasped my arm and pushed herself up. As she walked away, I heard a very quiet sob, then a cough.