Today is January 22, 2024. After more than a week of COLD (feels likes in the -20s), it is warming up to highs above freezing for the next week. Hardly any snow, which is both bad — what’s winter without snow? — and good — as it warms, there’s not enough snow to melt and then refreeze on the path every morning. I’m putting together my collection of 3 vision tests poems and hoping to submit them for publication somewhere — a contest? or should I try to find an agent?
jan 22, 2017 / 4 miles / 36 degrees
Here’s a line that, even if I don’t always write, I think often in winter:
I keep having to remind myself that it’s only January and that we have a lot of winter left.
jan 22, 2020 / 4.3 miles / 36 degrees / 25% snow-covered
Reading the following lines about encountering this man on the trail, I immediately remember and feel this moment, less than 2 months before everything shut down:
Encountered a man running and walking on the path. As I ran by he gasped, “you make it look so easy!” I wanted to yell back something about how I had been just like him 8.5 years ago when I started running, but I couldn’t get the words out in time. As I ran ahead I thought about how happy I am to have stuck with running and how wonderful it is to run over 4 miles and have it feel easy.
jan 22, 2021 / 3.1 miles / 7 degrees, feels like -3
I’m struck by this moment of sound and how I captured FWA’s “Let’s go.” I love having captured this classic line that he uttered so much and with such enthusiasm. I think he’s having fun in this moment, but it’s a dark time: senior year, stuck at home during the pandemic, online school, nothing to do but sit in his small room all day. It’s only now, 3 years later, that he’s finally confronting and working through the damage this did to him.
Earlier this morning, sitting at my desk in the front room, I heard a black capped chickadee calling outside. Quickly, I got my phone to record it. It wasn’t until after it stopped that I realized I had forgotten to push the record button. Bummer. Still, I recorded some other birds and a bird or a squirrel or something knocking on wood or an acorn. You can hear the tap tap tapping. Towards the end, you can also hear my 17 year old son, yelling out from his room (behind a closed door) to his friends online as they prepared to raid a base or something like that on whatever online game they were all playing. He was yelling the whole time I was recording, but this was the only bit of it that I can hear on the recording.
january 22, 2022 / 3.25 miles / treadmill
On this day, I was returning to my haunts poem, wanting to add some new verses about the girl, the ghost, and the gorge. I recorded this little bit, which I’ve since edited out. Do I have these lines in a document somewhere? Possibly but, just in case, here they are. Listening to them, I might want to put some of them back in. I’m still hoping to write a poem about the 8 year old girl I was and want to return to:
Also, I want to revist this beautiful poem: Letter to a Friend, Unsent/ Rebecca Lindenberg