4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
36 degrees
Yesterday afternoon we got 2 or 3 inches of snow. By the time I went out for my run in the late morning, much of it had melted, even on the grass. Excellent. It’s the warmer ground and the bright sun that did it. I was over-dressed in my purple jacket with a stocking cap. Halfway through the run, I took off the cap and held it in my hands.
As I ran south to the falls I chanted in triples. Lots of berries and sweet things (hot fudge sauce, fresh whipped cream), histories and mysteries and possibles, both muddy trail and mud on trail, and metronomes. On the way back, I put in my “doin’ time” playlist for the last day of my time month. I was planning to not stop to walk for the second half, but when a runner who was running the same speed or just a little slower than me joined the path in front of me, I decided to stop a few times to get some distance from them. One of the places I stopped was the bench above the edge of the world. I don’t remember what the river looked liked, all I remember was that looking at it made me feel calm and content and vast.
overheard while running by the falls: one person to a group of others, he should do it, his arms are the longest. Were they taking a group selfie?
10 Things
- water falling, 1: a steady gush out of a gutter
- water falling, 2: trickling from the sewer pipe at the ravine
- water falling, 3: gushing at the falls — mostly white foam
- shadow, 1: the small shadow of a bird crossing my path
- shadow, 2: the sprawled, gnarled, twisted, softened shadows of oak trees on the road
- shadow, 3: the sharp circle of the lamp part of the lamp post
- missing: the top railing of a wood fence on the edge of the trail
- several people in the falls parking lot, waiting to pay for parking
- empty benches
- a thin layer of snow on a leaning branch in the ravine
Found this poem the other day:
Color Keeps Time / Patrycja Humienik
or it rides us
like a torrent. Blurs
and fastens, flesh
to seconds. Just look
at your veins.
In vespertine woods,
I tried to read moss
by hand. There’s
something laconic
about green that I need.
Lover, let the morning slow
time through the branches.
vespertine: relating to, occurring, or active in the evening
laconic: using few words, concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious
What kind of time are different colors? What sort of time is orange, for example? If purple is twilight, orange is late afternoon or early summer evenings.
I tried to read moss/by hand. This line reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer and her suggestion that “Mosses, I think, are like time made visible. They create a kind of botanical forgetting. Shoot by tiny shoot, the past is obscured in green. That’s why we have stories, so we can remember” (Ancient Green/RWK).
“Color Keeps Time” is from the collection, We Contain Landscapes.