I am still in the process of unpacking and getting my new house set up (no kitchen yet, but we’re making progress!), so writing – as in actual chapters of a novel – is on the back burner. I’ve yet to find my notebooks! I’m anticipating a mid-September time frame for return to normalcy.
I’m not much of an athlete (don’t my high school chums know it!), but I have committed to at least ten miles a week of walking/half-assed running.
This is monumental for me. I’ve just moved back to Colorado, where the air is thin and nearly everything is uphill. I’ve just now, after three weeks, started running (if you can call it that) about 25% of my four mile walk. That’s downhill, of course. Are you kidding? It’ll be a few months before I graduate to uphill running.
When I walk, I only carry the cell phone so it can track my statistics. I don’t take calls, I don’t text, I don’t listen to music, or the witty repartee of podcasts. (I might take a photo or two, that’s it.) That’s because in addition to being nearly uphill to everywhere, the roads are twisty, the sidewalks are sparse, and the lawns are full of wildlife. I have to keep my wits about me just to stay alive.
Plus, I’d rather just walk/run in silence, or only with the noise of the natural world in the background.
So in the quiet, I can hear the chimes of the Shrine of the Sun. I can watch the magpies fighting each other for road kill. I can smell the piney aftermath of the hail storm of the century. I can peek at my neighbors’ houses, which are all mega-gorgeous. (We have the smallest, plainest house in the best neighborhood, what a coup!) Most of all, I can think!
So here are my random thoughts, along with random photos:
- I can spot a texter-and-driver from a half mile away. There’s that nearly imperceptible sway from the center of the lane. If they’re aiming at me, I’m heading for the grass.
- People are nice here! They say “good morning” or wave. You don’t want to speak or wave to pedestrians in Michigan, but in Colorado, do as the natives do.
- You must really watch out for wildlife. Bunnies abound. Deer too. Today a doe and her fawn came at me full bore down the street. This startled me, so I stopped. Then she stopped. (The fawn kept going, until it stopped too.) What do you do? You can’t shoo away a wild animal that weighs more than you do! Especially a mother-wild-animal. That would be suicide. So I waited a bit. A minute later, she crossed the street to continue on (obviously she had somewhere to go – in a hurry), and then the fawn followed. I continued on.
- The best time for outdoor exercise of any type in the summer is before 9 a.m. That’s because it gets brutally hot at 9:01 a.m.
- It’s really beautiful here. Not just pretty, but beautiful. I’d nearly forgotten.
- It occurs to me that a lot of things I have written about Colorado are true, even though I haven’t lived here since 1974. Perhaps a person’s memory is truer than you would think. Maybe slices of life are buried under decades of events rushing past you. Maybe I should think of some other places I’ve been, write about them, and revisit them?
- I’ve shaved off 11 minutes of time since I’ve gotten here. How can that be? Some days (especially the days about two weeks ago), I’d start out and think I was going to die. (Dude. That uphill mile.) I would plot out how to make a 9-11 call with my cell phone number still in Michigan. But it’s easier now. No 9-11 unless a mountain lion jumps out of a driveway.
- I find I miss my characters and wonder where my notebooks are. (I found my external hard drive (YAY!) but the nuts and bolts are in notebooks.
- Finally, there’s that chill in the air, so slight, but it’s telling me that fall is coming soon. I’d better find my long pants before it gets here.
