Ball field

Halle and I walk here most mornings. Instead of staying outside the ball field fence, Halle likes to go through the opening onto the playing field. She doesn’t go straight across the outfield though. She’s always been an edge walker. She sniffs along the fence, stopping to pee at select spots. This is how she maps the world, through scents both given and received.

The ball field is its own kind of map, but not one that corresponds to any physical place. It’s one of countless maps we lay on the earth that correspond to places in our mind. The game’s physical enough: the bats, the balls, the exertion of the players. But what’s being mapped out doesn’t have a physical location so much as a psychic one, a social and emotional one. Not that those locations are any less real. And Halle can probably sniff them out, too, come to think of it.