jan 10/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
28 degrees / humidity: 90% / mist
100% soft, slippery, snow-covered

Quiet, gray, dreamy. Disconnected from the world. Alone, but not lonely. Immersed in a slow, hard effort on a slippery trail. I’m ready for this soft snow to go away. I want a clear, solid path, please. My leg muscles are sore, but I don’t regret the run. How wonderful to be outside and moving beside the gorge in the winter!

No fresh, clean air. Instead, a poor air quality warning. I couldn’t feel it in my lungs, but I could see it in the sky. Everything was even fuzzier than usual.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. heard some harsh honks, then looked up in the sky. A vee of geese! I stopped to watch them flying low until they disappeared behind a tree
  2. the sky was a pleasing, soft gray
  3. running past a park kiosk, I heard some deep thumping. Could it be the knocking of a woodpecker?
  4. the falls were frozen, although as I ran by the bridge just above the falls, I noticed a dark open spot. I didn’t stop to listen for gurgling water. Would I have heard some?
  5. only one car and one person in the parking lot, standing near the machine where you pay for parking
  6. stopped to walk on the unplowed pedestrian side of the double bridge and heard nothing but a loud silence
  7. the path was covered in soft, slippery snow, with a few short stretches of packed snow
  8. the road (edmund) was slick and wet and had lots of streaks of brown, slushy, slippery snow
  9. kids’ voices drifting over from the school playground, mixing in with the geese honks
  10. felt a fine mist on my face — was it freezing rain? moisture in the air?

Found this poem on twitter the other day:

Lit/ Andrea Cohen

Everyone can’t
be a lamplighter.

Someone must
be the lamp,

and someone
must, in bereaved

rooms sit,
unfathoming what

it is to be lit.