Category: Running Log

jan 6/RUN

5.5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
11 degrees / feels like 5

Another sunny, snowless day. A little wind, some cold air. Wasn’t planning to run 5 miles, but I wanted to get to the bottom of the hill so I could see the surface up close. Iced over — not smooth, but with seams and cracks.

The Mississippi river at the bottom of the franklin hill. White ice, cracks, and shadows on its surface. Beyond it, the east bank with barre branches and blue sky.
ice on mississippi river / 6 jan 2025

I’m glad I took a picture because I did not remember it looking like this! I was visually a surface that was more gray and uniform with cracks creating big and flat sheets of ice. I didn’t remember the shadows or the blue or how uneven it all looked.

As I ran, I listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist. It started with “I Remember it Well,” from Gigi. I heard the opening lines:

We met at 9
We met at 8
I was on time
No, you were late
Ah yes
I remember it well

I thought — wait, if he thought they were meeting at 9, he wouldn’t have thought he was late if he got there after 8 — yes, these are they thoughts I have as I run. I thought about how subjective memory can be and wondered how certain we could be that she remembered correctly. Then I heard these lyrics:

Ah yes
I remember it well
You wore a gown of gold
I was all in blue

I remembered that meme 4 or 5 years ago with the dress — is it gold or blue? — and thought again about how we can remember things differently. When is it lack of memory, and when did we always just remember it wrong, or unusually, or with a focus on different details, or in a different light?

10 Things

  1. the hollow knocking of a woodpecker
  2. the thumping of wheels over something on the road on the bridge above
  3. 4 stones tightly stacked on the ancient boulder
  4. a section of the fence above a steep part of the bluff, missing, marked off with an orange barricade
  5. the icy river through the trees — blue and white and lonely
  6. daddy long legs at his favorite bench
  7. shadows, 1: mine, off to the side, in the brush next to the trail
  8. shadows, 2: a tree trunk, tall, stretched, looking like a dinosaur
  9. stopping at the edge to put in my headphones, seeing a flare of movement below: someone walking on the winchell trail
  10. the limestones still stacked under the bridge, still looking like a person sitting up and leaning against the bridge

A poem about forgetting:

Said a Blade of Grass/ Kahlil Gibran

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling!  You scatter all my winter dreams.”
 
Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling!  Songless, peevish thing!  You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”
 
Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept.  And when spring came she waked again—and she was a blade of grass.
 
And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves!  They make such noise!  They scatter all my winter dreams.”

more forget lines

1

like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.
(Part of Eve’s Discussion/Marie Howe)

2

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too
(Dead Stars/Ada Limón)

3

See whatever you want
to see. Even
at the moment of death
forget the door

opening on darkness.
See instead the familiar faces
you thought were lost.
(Squint/Linda Pastan)

4

According to Howe, most (all?) of the critical studies of ED as a poet (up to 1985, when this book was written), read ED’s decision to stay isolated in her bedroom for the rest of her life as tragedy and a failure to celebrate herself as a poet (Whitman) or declare herself confidently as the Poet, the Sayer, the Namer (Emerson). Howe argues that she made another choice and writes the following:

She said something subtler. ‘Nature is a Haunted House–but Art–a House that tries to be haunted.’ (L459a)

Yes, gender difference does affect our use of language, and we constantly confront issues of difference, distance, and absence when we write. That doesn’t mean I can relegate women to what we ‘should’ or ‘must’ be doing. Orders suggest hierarchy and category. Categories and hierarchies suggest property. My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct every poem. There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.

My Emily Dickinson/ Susan Howe

jan 5/RUN

5.3 miles
va bridge and back
9 degrees / feels like -3

A little colder today, so more layers: 2 pairs of running tights; one long-sleeved shirt, two sweatshirts, one with a hood; a jacket; gloves; mittens; buff; 2 pairs of socks; sunglasses; cap.

My IT band was sore again. Time to play around with i and t! — in too deep; into gorge; intonation; in today’s economy?; intoxicating; intolerable; in top form; into the woods

10 Things

  1. bright blue sky
  2. sharp, solid shadows, 1: mine, running right in front of me
  3. shadows, 2: slender, twisted branches on the asphalt
  4. birds!, 1: rooting around in the dry brush, making a loud noise
  5. birds!, 2: fluttering, flickering, flashing in and out of the bare branches on the edge of the trail
  6. the falls!, 1: nearing them from above I could hear that they were more frozen as water fell over ice columns and made a sharp, tinkling sound
  7. the falls!, 2: from my favorite spot, thick ice columns with water gushing through
  8. the river! — everywhere I looked, swaths of white placed over the surface — not everything was white, but what was looked extra white, almost like frosting
  9. the faint and fleeting scent of smoke
  10. the view from the bench above the edge of the world was enormous and open and bright desolation

After turning around at the entrance of the VA bridge, I thought about the veterans across the bridge and I wondered who lived there and for long and whether or not they get the resources they needed. With all of the other layers of life — past and present — here, I don’t often think of them, and I don’t know much about the history of this place. Not too far down the river is Fort Snelling and the big cemetery. My Uncle Tim who died in Vietnam before I was born is buried there, and my grandfather’s ashes, too. My mother was devastated by her brother’s death, and she rarely ever talked about him to me. Too painful for her to remember? Strange to think about how close I am in proximity to my family on my mom’s side and how little I know about them.

1

As I continue to tag past entries with “remember/forget,” I came across these lovely lines from Carl Phillips:

just the rings that form then disappear
around where some latest desire — lost, or abandoned —
dropped once, and disturbed the water. To forget —
then remember . . . What if, between this one and the one
we hoped for, there’s a third life, taking its own
slow, dreamlike hold, even now — blooming in spite of us?
(Sky Coming Forward/Carl Phillips)

2

And if my father says haunt

he doesn’t mean the way rooms forget him
once he’s gone; he’s saying his leather chair
now in his coworker’s office, his locker
in the back room newly purged
of its clutter, or his usual table
in the break room where he sits
at 10:30 each night eating
the same steak club and chips
(Haunt/Maya Phillips)

3

Crossing between gain and loss:
learning new words for the world and the things in it.
Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it.
And collecting words in a different language
for those three primary colors:
staying, leaving, and returning.
(Big Clock/Li-Young Lee)

4

And here’s a quotation from Alice Oswald in an interview for Falling Awake:

It’s good to remember how to forget. I’m interested in the oral tradition: what keeps the poems alive is a little forgetting. In Homer you get the sense that anything could happen because the poet might not remember.

Re-reading this idea, I’m reminded of AO’s discussion of her method for her book-length poem, Dart:

I decided to take along a tape-recorder. At the moment, my method is to tape a conversation with someone who works on the Dart, then go home and write it down from memory. I then work with these two kinds of record – one precise, one distorted by the mind – to generate the poem’s language. It’s experimental and very against my grain, this mixture of journalism and imagination, but the results are exciting. Above all, it preserves the idea of the poem’s voice being everyone’s, not just the poet’s.source

I’d like to try doing this with the documenting of my runs: experimenting with combining recordings with my memory/imagination of what happened (from log entry 14 march 2022).

I’m not interested, at least at this point, in interviewing people by the river, but I wonder if I could play around with recordings and memory — how what I remember strays from what actually happened? Maybe not with words but images? Or, I could play around with recordings of sounds, using this Steve Healey poem which I reread this morning during my “on this day” practice:

2 Mississippi/ Steve Healey

a map?

The other day, as I mentioned the “edge of the world” in a post, I thought about how I’d like to add a map to this log. This map would include all of my landmarks, with the names I use for them in my entries: the old stone steps, the double bridge, the edge of the world, the tunnel of trees, the ancient boulder with the stacked stones, the sliding bench. Ideally, this map would be hand-drawn, but I don’t think that’s possible with my bad vision. Maybe Scott could help me and we could get it printed and framed for the wall?

jan 4/WALK

20 minutes with Delia
neighborhood
7 degrees / feels like 4

Winter! Heading north, an arctic wind, but otherwise, not bad. Warm sun, no snow. I love being outside and moving. A thought: I should commit to doing one or two long-ish walks each week to somewhere. The library? A coffee place?

10 Things

  1. dead, brown leaves on top of a pile of crusty snow
  2. a high-pitched, quiet whine from a truck on the next block
  3. the bare, gnarled, tall branches of the oak tree on the corner
  4. 2 green dumpsters on the sidewalk outside of Turtle Bread
  5. almost stumbling as I stepped on a small rock or hard chunk of snow
  6. a neighbor on the next block having an animated conversation with the mailman
  7. bark! — Delia the dog unexpectedly barking at them from across the street
  8. bark! bark! bark! — a dog in a backyard calling out to Delia
  9. the tree on the corner across from the Blue Door — dead, most of it trimmed away, more than a stump with a few dead branches still remaining
  10. the sun! heading south, warming my face and making it difficult to see if anyone was approaching

While tagging old entries with “remember/forget,” I came across Emily Dickinson’s poem about forget-me-nots on 2 march 2021, which helped me to remember that I was thinking about it — vaguely — as I ran yesterday!

There are spaces for living
and spaces for forgetting.
Sometimes they’re the same.
(Voiceover/ Rita Dove)

jan 3/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
12 degrees / feels like -3

With the sun, it didn’t feel like -3 to me. No brain freeze from the wind, or numb fingers, or frozen snot in my nose. Well, as I’m write this I’m remembering that my legs felt slightly disconnected from my body, like logs or stumps, which is because of the cold.

My shadow ran in front of me as I headed north. She never wandered from the trail. I was just about to write that I forgot to look at the river, or forgot what I saw when I looked at the river, but then I remembered: sheets of white spread across, from east to west, between lake street bridge and the trestle. The ice looked like white waves and very cold. I stopped at the sliding bench for a moment and admired the river, then stopped a few minutes later to admire it again. Quiet, calm, a soft blueish-gray.

I listened to my new playlist (see below), so I don’t remember noticing much else. I was re-energized when Taylor Swift’s “I Forgot that You Existed” came on, and had some interesting ideas during “Veronica” about memories and the mind and thoughts and when and where they do and don’t travel and how and when we can’t access them anymore. Then I thought of an image for thoughts scattering and one’s mind being blown that I read on twitter several years ago: a mind being blown as not being blown up, but as being scattered like someone blowing on a dandelion — each thought or idea or memory is one of the dandelion seeds being spread. Now I’m thinking about each memory or thought as a bee swarming from a hive . . .

remember and forget

It’s looking more and more like remembering and forgetting might be my theme for january. It seems fitting for the first month of the year, when I’m trying to remember some things and forget others from 2024. I’m excited about this topic, and have thought about it before. There are so many ways I could approach it: the moment of remembering, the softness of forgetting, memorizing poems, memory loss . . .

Here’s my tentative remember to forget playlist:

  1. Remember the Time/ Michael Jackson
  2. I Don’t Remember/ Peter Gabriel
  3. I Keep Forgettin’/ Michael McDonald
  4. Try to Remember/ The Fantasticks
  5. Don’t You (Forget About Me)/ Simple Minds
  6. I Remember/Molly Drake
I
  7. Forget to Remember to Forget/ Johnny Cash
  8. September/ Earth, Wind, and Fire
  9. I Forgot that you Existed/ Taylor Swift
  10. Veronica/ Elvis Costello
  11. I Love You and Don’t You Forget It/ Sarah Vaughn
  12. Do You Remember Rock n Roll Radio/Ramones
  13. Do You Remember Walter?/ The Kinks
  14. Remember/ A Little Night Music
  15. I Remember it Well/ Gigi
  16. Forget You/ Cee Lo Green
  17. (Love Will) Turn Back the Hand of Time/ Grease 2
  18. Memory/ Barbara Streisand


and here are a pair of lines from two different poems, one about forgetting, one about remembering:

the snow
has forgotten
how to stop
(Blizzard/ Linda Pastan)

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
(The Meadow/Marie Howe)

jan 2/RUN

5 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
18 degrees / feels like 10

A beautiful, sunny morning. Cold enough to make my eyes water but not my feet numb. Birds, sharp shadows, a clear path. Only a few small chunks of hard snow on the walking path. From the distance, the river looked completely open and ice-free. When I stopped at the bottom of the hill to check, I noticed a few lumps scattered around the surface. If I hadn’t stopped, I never would have seen them — there were so few of them, and they were so small!

I remembered to look at the river. I forgot the sudden and unexpected surge of anxiety I experienced before the run, while I was sitting at my desk — not panic, but a rush of something then shaking hands, chattering teeth — then remembered it, and then forgot it again. This happened throughout the run. I remembered to breathe and to stay relaxed. I forgot to check my watch. I remembered to zip up my jacket pocket so one of my black gloves wouldn’t fall out. I forgot to check and see if June’s ghost bike was still hanging on the trestle. I remembered the time I ran up the franklin hill and recorded myself describing it. I forgot to look for fat tires.

Halfway up the franklin hill, I stopped to walk and put in my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist, since the shadows were wonderful today. The fourth song to come on was Cream’s “White Room.” I thought about the second verse and these lyrics:

You said no strings could secure you at the station
Platform ticket, restless diesels, goodbye windows

First, I was struck by the strings. I thought about invisible threads or tugs, then Taylor Swift’s invisible strings. Then, I was struck by nouns in the second line, especially the restless diesels and goodbye windows. I’m not sure if I thought about it while I was running, but now I’m thinking about one of RJP’s favorite books as a kid, The Hello Goodbye Window.

Before the run, and before my surge of anxiety, I edited and added to some lines about descending into the gorge that I had started last week. I was partly inspired by a discussion with FWA yesterday about his walk down the old stone steps to the beach. The lines aren’t quite finished, but here’s what I have. I’m hoping to have FWA read them to see if they capture any of his experience:

From the bottom, she
looks up to behold
a steep set of stone
steps wedged in loam by
grandfathers. At the top,
the edge, and beyond,
the trail, then the road,
wind-bent trees, worn grass,
a neighborhood. Down
here feels different — wild,
untouched, real, above
only distant dream.
The girl follows a
break in the trees to
a white sand beach and
the river. She shuts
her eyes and listens
for the bells that chime
four times an hour.
Once or twice, instead,
she’s heard a bagpipe’s
mournful skirl float
down from the cenotaph
on the other bluff.
A moment, a breath —
she opens her eyes
returns through the trees
ascends the steps and
breaks the spell.

And, speaking of remembering and forgetting, here’s another fragment I’m working on:

One day the girl sees
the river and re-
members what she saw.
One day she sees the
river and does not.
And one day she for-
gets to look. How strange
it is to not notice
what is right there,
looming so large it
has shaped this whole world.

jan 1/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
15 degrees / feels like 3 / flurries

2025, I’m not sure how I feel about you. Not dread, but not exuberant hope either. I guess I’m trying not to think about you and what you might bring that much. Running beside the gorge helps. Very few, what ifs, many more now and now and nows. Today’s run was great. I was surprised to see that the feels like temp was 3. It didn’t feel that cold. I guess I picked the right layers: 2 pairs of black running tights, a black fleece-lined cap with ear flaps, a gray buff, a faded green long-sleeved shirt, a bright orange sweatshirt, a purple jacket, gray long socks, black short socks, black gloves, pink and white striped gloves. At the halfway point, one pair of gloves came off.

While I ran, I thought about remembering and forgetting and decided when I returned home, my 10 things list would be of things remembered and things forgotten.

10 Things Remembered or Forgotten

  1. I remembered to look down at the river
  2. I remembered what it looked like: steel blue, a few thin sheets of ice
  3. I remembered to stop at the bench above the edge of the world to take in the openness — soft, almost still except for a single leaf fluttering and several leaves sizzling, and was the water moving very slowly or was that just the staticky buzz of my glitching cone cells?
  4. I forgot about my headache
  5. I forgot about my IT band
  6. In mile 3, I remembered my IT band and thought about how it’s impossible to fully forget your body, which is good, because why would I want to do that?
  7. I forgot the election
  8. I remembered to look carefully, and more than once, before crossing from the trail to the grassy boulevard
  9. I remembered to stop at my favorite view of the falls — the water was gushing over the side
  10. I remembered what I overheard above the falls: a dad — no hiking today, a mom: we can take a walk instead!

I suppose it’s easier to remember what you remembered, than to remember what you forgot!

Reading through a past entry from 1 jan 2019, I was reminded of how I used to gather favorite lines at the end of the year and turn them into a new poem. I’d like to do that again this year!

The poems that I’ve been writing this fall about the gorge, are mostly about water and stone, but the open space of the gorge is important too. I’d like to devote some time to it as air, as openness, as possibility, as room to breathe, as Nothingness, as mystery, as inexplicable, as . . . . Here are two different fragments that may or may not turn into something:

When water cut through
rock, sandstone wore away,
limestone broke up, and
an abundance of
air arrived.

*

When water cut through
sandstone and limestone,
it made of the rock
still standing a frame
to loosely hold the
newly formed space. And
what a space! Such an
abundance of air!
Such room to breathe and
to be! Big enough
to hold more than is
seen or imagined
or witnessed with words.

dec 30/WALK

1.5 mile walk with Delia
the gorge, from 36th to 34th
32 degrees / fog

Good job, Sara. You resisted the urge to run. A walk with Delia was wonderful. So quiet and calm and relaxed! Moist, too. I loved breathing in the cool air and almost floating through the fog. All of it, a soft dream. Occasionally I encountered others — some walkers and runners — but mostly it was just us. At one point, descending through the tunnel of trees, which isn’t really a tunnel anymore because they cut it back at some point, the only thing I could hear was a hammer pounding across the road. No cars or voices or striking feet. Wow! Several times, I felt a warm buzz.

10 Things

  1. a white sky
  2. open water
  3. wet asphalt
  4. grass covered in brown leaves
  5. a dark form descending into the ravine — silent, featureless
  6. a brown view of the floodplain forest — all slender trunks and bare branches, no river or sky poking through
  7. a runner in the neighborhood emerging from an alley in a sprint, then returning to the alley, then appearing again, then disappearing around the corner
  8. thump thump thump the striking feet of a runner across the street — the same one? I’m not sure
  9. the silvery sparkle of the sign at the 35th street overlook — is this sign new?
  10. overheard: a woman running alongside a kid on a bike, talking to the kid — you had your pink backpack and your droopy dog stuffed animal — did she say droopy, or some other word?

I wanted to think about my Ars Poetica poem as I walked, and I did, but I’m still stuck. Something about letting things breathe and be exposed to the air to see what happens and erosion and ruins. I’ll give it until the end of the year, and if I’m still stuck, I’ll put it away for a bit.

forget what you are

While reading poet’s Cynthia Cruz’s explanation of how her poem, “Dark Register” is shaped by Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, I encountered these lines about habit:

“Habit,” in the third stanza refers to Hegel’s concept of habit: the act of repeating an action that, through this repetition, becomes second nature. For Hegel, habit implies forgetting: we forget what we are doing once the action becomes habit.

Cynthia Cruz on “Dark Register”

we forget what we are . . . . I immediately thought of Marie Howe’s beautiful poem, “The Meadow” and her lines about her dying brother:

I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are.

This forgetting also reminds me of Mary Rueffle’s reference to Levi-Strauss’ “unhitching, which I wrote about on may 31, 2023. First, my rough paraphrasing:

unhitching happens in brief moments when we can step outside of or beside or just beyond — below the threshold of thought, over and above society — to contemplate/experience/behold the this, the what it is, the essence of everything, Mary Oliver’s eternity.

Second, a quote from Levi-Strauss in Mary Ruefle:

The possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists … in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society; in the contemplating of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

Lévi-Strauss quoted MRH page 52

Wow, all of this is making me think of something I wrote, referencing Mary Oliver, about the gorge. Initially I added it on the end of my geologic time poem, and maybe it should stay there and be extended, or maybe it should be another poem? Here are the lines:

Every day this place
erodes the belief
that rock will stand still,
is here forever,
unmoved, unmoving. 
And yet, with its slow 
slight shifts on a scale 
almost beyond her 
comprehension, these 
rocks might be as close 
as the girl can get
to eternity.

So many more connections I could make with forgiveness and forgetting and remembering and now and now and now!

dec 29/RUN

5 miles
minnehaha park and back
34 degrees / fog / humidity: 94%

Almost all of the snow, which wasn’t much to begin with, is gone. The ice, too. Hardly any wind, but plenty of moisture — the trail, the air, my face. Ran past the falls and John Stevens’ house to the VA bridge, then turned around and ran beside the falls. Stopped at my favorite spot to admire the falls, which were gushing. Put in “Billie Eilish” playlist and ran home.

10 Things

  1. mostly bare grass — the only snow were little mounds where the walking path split off from the biking path
  2. the creek water was fast and steel gray
  3. heard the train bells from across the road, then the horn tapping twice — beep beep
  4. car lights cutting through the mist/fog
  5. an older man pushing an empty wheelchair on the path
  6. glancing down at the Winchell trail north of 38th street, seeing two people walking on a part near the edge, high above the water
  7. I just wrote gray sky, no sun or shadows, but then I remembered there were a few patches of blue sky
  8. overheard: one woman walker to another — ptsd, trump, spend time with family
  9. smiling and waving to people I encountered — one good morning to another runner
  10. a man and a woman stopped at the edge of the walkway down to the bridge over the falls looking at something on a phone — I finally got it! Its back at my apartment

For the past 3 days, Scott, FWA, RJP, and I were up in Duluth. Very mild — no snow, no wind, no waves, some drizzle. Lake Superior was beautiful, especially the first night. While we were gone, I didn’t run. Today was my first day back since Thursday. My left hip is sore after the run. I should take more of a break.

I’m returning to my “Ars Poetica” poem and wanting to use this bit from Kafka for inspiration:

According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.

Not becoming one with the gorge, but striving to press deeper and deeper into it, to leave a trace/mark on it, and be marked by it.

dec 26/RUN

4 miles
trestle+ turn around
34 degrees

Yesterday I said I wasn’t planning to run again this week, but the paths were clear, the weather was above freezing, and I couldn’t resist. I nice morning for a run! Not sure how much of it was my vision and how much was moist, gray air , but everything looked extra blurry today. I didn’t even recognize Dave the Daily Walker until he greeted me by name.

10 Things

  1. happy, shouting kids somewhere on the hill between edmund and the parkway — were they sledding? I couldn’t see them, but that’s what it sounded like
  2. open water — dark gray
  3. fee bee fee bee
  4. a runner passing me from behind wearing a bright yellowish-green shirt that looked like the same one I had on under my vest and sweatshirt — was it for the 10 mile race from 5 years ago, like mine?
  5. stopped at my new favorite bench and looked down the slope at the white sands beach far below
  6. some voices down in the gorge — sounding far enough away to be on the other side
  7. the bells of St. Thomas chiming!
  8. one loud, deep bark up ahead — heard, not seen — I wonder how bit the dog was that made that sound?
  9. the walking trail is completely covered with snow — no bare walking trail until spring?
  10. more than once, the distant knocking of a woodpecker up in a tree

dec 25/RUN

2 miles
river road trail, south/42nd west/edmund, north
33 degrees

Okay, I didn’t make it a week without running, but I did take off 3 days, and I only ran 2 miles and only because I wanted to run on Christmas with Scott. I’ll go back to taking a break again for the rest of the week. It was mild out there, with only a little bit of ice on the edges of the road and the trail. Heading south, the wind was cold, but north you didn’t even notice it. We encountered some people running or walking and waved at them. The sky was gray and heavy and made it feel like there was a thin veil of moist air over everything. How much of that was my vision, how much the illusion created by the heavy grayness of everything?

This year, we’re having a “no expectations” Christmas. A few nice meals/desserts, some small presents, a 3 day trip to Duluth. I don’t mind it. I used to love Christmas and all of its rituals, but with so many people gone or far away, it’s not much fun these days. I’m sure I’ll enjoy it again in a few years. Right now, I’m grateful that RJP and FWA took some time this semester to figure some things out, and that they’re both doing better.