5 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
61 degrees / humidity: 73%
Warmer today, which meant more sweating and a little more effort. This week is the big one: 5, 10, and 20 milers. Mostly, I felt good. No kneecap slips today. At the beginning of the run, I noticed the wind rushing through the trees. In my head I recited, I am the wind and the wind is invisible. All the leaves tremble but I am invisible. Later I chanted, life is but life is but life is but life is but death is but death is but death is but death is but bliss is but bliss is but bliss is but bliss is but breath is but breath is but breath is but breath / life life life death death death bliss bliss bliss breath breath breath.
10 Things
- fall is here, 1: streaks of red in the trees on the edge of the trail
- fall is here, 2: a stretch of grass carpeted with red and yellow and brown leaves
- a woman near the road down to minneapolis rowing club in a bright yellow vest
- cheeseburger cheeseburger — carolina wren
- wet and slightly slippery trails, caused by yesterday’s rain
- just north of the big crack by the trestle, more cracks returning, widening, spreading
- a startled squirrel — it was about to dart out, then decided so abruptly to reverse course that it jumped up to the side and did a frantic spin
- empty benches, including the sliding bench
- no more stacked slabs of stone looking like a sitting person under the franklin bridge
- I think I heard some rowers on the river, but didn’t see them
Listened to the cars and the birds as I ran north. Put in my “Hello, Goodbye” playlist for the last mile.
September is the month when 3 out of our 4 parents died: Scott’s dad on 1 sept 2023; Scott’s mom on 29 sept 2022; and my mom on 30 sept 2009. So, it’s fitting to post this beautiful poem halfway through September:
Not the Bread Machine, but the Space It Takes / Sara Rosenberg
For years it rested beneath the pantry’s
floating shelves, sap-sticky with spills:
hot honey and rice slipped from the bag.
Then, behind the giant soup pot I used only once,
to brine a turkey the way my mother used to
on my first Thanksgiving without her—Prussian blue
and dented, speckled like a bird egg. Later, I wedged it
beside the pasta maker and its many attachments,
another thing I never knew I wanted
until she gave it to me, as if to say I was worthy
of time-saving, of a homemade dough I didn’t have to knead.
For weeks, it sat in the box of waiting donations,
where each time I bent down to haul it away, a stone
fell down the back of my throat.
Crusted with the bread I cultivated, crumb
of wheat, of banana, of oatmeal, from when I lived
alone in the rat house behind the landlord’s five-bedroom,
pretending his black creek was my black creek,
that his chimney’s columns of smoke
were my columns of smoke. She showed up
at my door with a box of new cutlery, knives so clean
I saw my face in them, with new dish cloths I had never
thought to need. She set the appliance on the green
tile countertop like a bouquet of roses.
I heard it whir, warm with promise, loud as rain.
A memory so delicate it flakes in my hand.
So vivid in its conjuring, and that title! Wow.