4.45 miles
minnehaha falls and back
31 degrees
100% slick, sloppy mess
Yuck! With warmer temperatures comes puddles, slicker ice, and soaked socks. Most of the trail was covered in little brown lakes. Oh well. The sun was warm on my face, and I felt almost too warm in my layers, so I was happy to get out there and run. Because I was trying out my new bluetooth headphones, and because the path was so challenging, I was distracted. Did I notice at least 10 things? I’ll try:
10 Things I Noticed
- running south into the sun, the slick path sparkled
- kids yellling at the playground. I think I heard one deep voice — was it a teacher?
- there was a very big puddle in the street at 42nd, right by the path. As cars drove through it, I could hear all the water splashing up onto the curb — glad I wasn’t running there!
- passed the same group of 3 walkers + 2 dogs in both directions on the narrow bridge
- the river was mostly open, with streaks of white ice
- a few people at the falls, near the bridge
- a man and a dog playing in the snow near the longfellow poem at the falls
- unable to avoid it, I ran straight through a deep puddle on my tiptoes
- glanced over at the house with the poetry in the window to check if there was a new poem. Too much snow to see the sign with the poem title
- the long dark tree branch of the mostly dead tree on the corner stretched across the path and the road. I wondered, as I ran under it, if it would fall on me
As part of my February challenge, I’m reading poems from Linda Pastan. Here’s the one for today:
Practicing/ Linda Pastan
My son is practicing the piano.
He is a man now, not the boy
whose lessons I once sat through,
whose reluctant practicing
I demanded–part of the obligation
I felt to the growth
and composition of a child.
Upstairs my grandchildren are sleeping,
though they complained earlier of the music
which rises like smoke up through the floorboards,
coloring the fabric of their dreams.
On the porch my husband watches the garden fade
into summer twilight, flower by flower;
it must be a little like listening to the fading
diminuendo notes of Mozart.
But here where the dining room table
has been pushed aside to make room
for this second- or third-hand upright,
my son is playing the kind of music
it took him all these years,
and sons of his own, to want to make.
I love the gentle way this poem unfolds, how it reminds me of my son and demanding he practice his clarinet, and its idea that practice accumulates and can take decades to lead to the things we want to do.
The practicing son in this poem reminds me of another poem I posted in the fall, Transubstantiation:
my six-year-old grandson, in the early
August rainy morning, piano-practices
“The Merry Widow Waltz.” Before
I was a widow, that song was
only a practice piece, a funny
opera