Day 301

She runs early, through the warm autumn meadow, it is easy today, a lovely Indian summer day at the end of October.  At Refrigerator corner the sun is playing tag with the softly grey stratocumulus clouds, and on the other side of the meadow the moon still rides high in a clear sky, hoping for a glimpse of this beautiful star.

She thinks of her husband far away in Yosemite, hiking a long uphill trail.  She misses him keenly, especially at night.  Going to bed alone is strange after twenty-six years of sleeping together.  His absence upsets her rest, and strange and anxious dreams sometimes occur when he is not there to shape his body to hers, to drape his arm safely over her.


She stills the rhythmic song in her head and decides to listen to the sounds of the meadow.

She hears the cheerful chickadees, observes them flitting from branch to branch.

A bluejay flies over her head, lands on the tree nearby and scolds her in his harsh voice, "Stop this running business and go and put out the peanuts already!".

A large aeroplane can be heard but not seen, on the way to Logan Airport, with its human cargo and all the things which have to go with people on their journeys.

An unknown bird repeats a single sound very fast for about a minute at a time.

The sudden hasty flapping of several dark-eyed juncos, surprised out of the tall grasses.


She realises that she is the loudest creature in the meadow, even though she is not speaking or singing out loud.

Her expelled breath rushes out of her with a whooshing sound, the fabric of her trousers makes a crinkling noise as her legs brush past one another, and the pounding of her feet make a different sound depending on the terrain.  In the forest her shoes swish through the leaves.  On Babbling brook hill the sound of her feet is loud going down and soft coming up.  When she reaches the meadow grass the sound is muffled, until she goes downhill on the wet grass which makes her shoes squeak.


And is there a sound for a field of grasses strung together with light?


Is there a sound for the delicacy of a small crimson leaf fallen on a sea of green?


Or the soft, oh soft creamy sky so light before the sun?


She finds that she has somehow set the pedometer again on kilometers, and is astonished and delighted to find that she has run 5.13km, running 7.12 minutes per kilometer!  Her fastest 5 km yet. 


And now she is very disappointed because she had a lovely photograph and a pleasant self-portrait for today's post, but there is something wrong with the uploading process, so tomorrow evening her personal computer wizard comes home and will probably just turn on the laptop and it will obediently do everything right, maybe he will just have to stand next to it and it will work.  Which has happened before.

Well, actually, she managed herself!  Still some things wrong, but managed to upload at least!