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BookTrib has the honor of sharing this year’s winners for the 8th Annual Write a DearReader contest. Winners were selected from hundreds of entries. DearReader offers this competition each year just to encourage writing. It’s all about writing for fun.

Today’s story is DearReader’s 3rd place winner. Watch for the posting of 2nd and 1st place winning submission this week. Maybe you’ll consider entering your story in the 9th annual DearReader contest happening summer 2013.  – Enjoy

Dear Reader,

Take a peaceful stroll today with Bruce Squiers, 3rd place winner in this year’s Write a Dear Reader Contest. My husband and I take a walk every morning on the same familiar route. You’d think familiar would get a bit boring, but instead the familiar sights I see make me feel right at home.

Bruce Squiers is a recently retired, daily newspaper photographer, who now works part-time assisting elderly folks in their homes. He’s a delightful, fun guy. What you’ll read in his winning column, is what you get when you talk with him. We chatted like old friends for 45 minutes.

Congratulations Bruce. Thanks for entering this year’s writing contest. Your $100.00 prize and a copy of my book, “Muffins and Mayhem: Recipes for a Happy (if disorderly) Life” are in the mail.

- Suzanne Beecher
Author, Muffins and Mayhem

3RD PLACE

Winner: Bruce Squiers

Is it spiritual renewal? Mental therapy? Perhaps even self-prescribed psychotherapy? At its least, it’s physical therapy. I simply call it my morning walk.

My thoughts and body get in synch as I leave the porch, sometimes with a cane, sometimes not, and I pace along the road. Often as not, I turn at the bridge which spans the river, and there I stretch and work those battered legs.

A Great Blue Heron passes along the river, looking for its breakfast.

I stretch some more, then pass through the morning shadows and pass a parking lot where a fisherman puts on his waders, hoping to snag himself a trout. He tells me he’s going to try his luck by walking up the tracks to a nearby railroad bridge.

I turn where the bridge road meets the county road where I will meet its hills. Almost immediately, a doe and her fawn stand briefly in the road and stare at me. It’s a sight I often see in June and never tire of it. I’m convinced that in some mystical way, that mom is showing off her new baby. They then glide into a woodland which nearly touches the highway.

I could even see a bald eagle as it courses along the river. I will see cows from a nearby farm. I might have to stop as a neighbor drives past and has to ask how I’m doing.

This day is warm and sunlit. Some are cold and raw and cloaked with clouds. Sometimes i walk this route at night, and the stars put on their evening performance. It’s always the same, and always different at once.

The time and conditions vary daily, but somehow, as I return to my little home along the river, I am renewed.

I’ll repeat this process tomorrow.