4.1 miles
trestle+ turn around
15 degrees / feels like 1
75% snow-covered
Hooray for getting back outside! I never felt cold. Hands and feet were fine, torso too. About halfway in, I overheated. Off with the mittens, down with the hood. The run didn’t feel easy; my legs were sore. But I bargained with myself — make it to the trestle, keep going until the sliding bench, don’t stop until after the hill! And I was able to shift gears, settling into something different with my legs (hard to explain). I lifted out of my hips, relaxed my shoulders and kept going for longer than I thought I would. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Stopped running to witness a wedge of geese flying overhead. Heard the rattling jawbone of some bird. Noticed that the river was open and dark under the trestle. Everywhere else it was white.
10 Things
- a honk cutting through the quiet then less than a dozen geese flying in a loose formation — I think I heard the swish of their wings as they passed directly above me
- the smell of tobacco beside me — did it come from the open window of a passing car?
- the smell of weed below me
- 3 stones stacked on the ancient boulder, half covered with snow
- a runner approaching from behind with a dog on a leash tethered to their waist, running faster than me through the snow
- the constant view beside me: slender bare brown slanted branches white river a white brown bluff on the other side of the river
- a flash of BRIGHT orange to my left — someone in an orange jacket walking below near the old stone steps
- a big dog — golden retriever? — squatting and pooping on the side of the path, their owner waiting with a bag
- a light brown cobblestone carriage walk in front of a fancy house on edmund
- the sharp crunch of one foot striking the crusty snow in my alley, the soft grind of the other foot leaving the snow
shades, shadows, memories
Before the run, I was reviewing May 2024 entries. This bit about the children’s book, The Shades, inspired some thoughts:
. . .they live in the garden. All of their food comes from the shadow’s cast by real food, their house cast from the shadow of the old summer house that “broke Emily’s heart” when it was torn down. Most of the time they do what they want, but when a human enters the garden, whichever of them best fits that human’s form must shadow them around the garden. Sometimes this shadowing is fun, other times it’s tedious, and occasionally it’s dangerous: if a human climbs over the garden wall, the shadow must follow and be lost to the outside world forever.
log entry 20 may 2024
Thinking about the shadow’s independence from the object that cast them and their attaching forms that approximately fit, I started thinking about memories and the gorge. I imagined countless memories (as shadows?) living there, made and left behind by everyone that has spent time at the gorge. Then I imagined running through/with/beside them and some of them attaching to me (in some way). The memories weren’t mine exactly; they were independent of me with their own experiences and histories and feelings. But, beside the gorge, we become entangled. Maybe I can add this to the poem I started about shadows. I’d also like to add this idea: the silhouette as “a radical condensation of faith in shadows” from 17 may 2024.