Day 125

Tall grass taking over my path.  Amazing to think that when I began this quest, the path had to be beaten through the snow.

I ran 2.45 miles (3.9 km) at high noon, which seems to be my 'comfort distance'.  Hot grass smells wafted up from my feet, and at several places along Heartbreak Hill there is a wonderful bush growing, with little dangling yellow flowers, that I don't know at all, but which stops you in your tracks to get more of it, more and more until your nose is soaking it in - delectable as ambrosia!

I met two snakes in the meadow, sunning themselves on this beautiful day.  I hope the first one is alright, although it hurtled off into the undergrowth after I had inadvertently stepped on it, but I noticed it as I was about to, so I think I almost or completely avoided it...  I squeaked a bit though, like a woman who has seen a mouse in her kitchen.  (Wearing a baseball cap really obstructs your peripheral vision.)  I was dreaming away,  coming from the meadow into the shady bit before the dirt road, when I saw something slithering for its life ahead of my heffalumping feet, another little snake, who then leapt off into the more vegetated side of the road, and stopped dead, believing itself to be suddenly invisible, and it almost is, like that.  Looks like one of the sticks, doesn't it?

The boys and I have a race for the back door every time we arrive home in the same car.  Of course, they mostly win, being tall, long-legged, younger, and stronger runners than I am.  Plus the fact that I collapse laughing when I can see that I am going to lose abominably!  The other day I knew that Matthew had to collect his wet sailing things from the back seat and that I could get a head start if I went for it, around the front of the car.  I flung myself out of my seat, launched around the front bumper, tripped and catapulted face-first into the needle-like twigs of a pruned cedar bush!  Matthew's face was a mixture of confusion and hilarity, "Mom, are you alright?  Your hair is full of bits..." and we both collapsed laughing on the bonnet of the car, me with blood flowing out of various cuts on my face!