The Way Home

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With windrows eventually curving back to where I begin,  I use the newly mown field as a track, and over stubble my legs move in steady rhythm, unbroken save where an odd branch or dip forces my stride.  It's August ending, and my feet raise life.  Strikingly bright against the grass, swallowtails eddy upward from my wake, and grasshoppers slice sideways through the air before my foot falls. Without warning, I'm surprised by a strange and momentary pang, a quick flood of regret that I'm outside of this seasonal cycle, like a clumsy giant who disrupts everything by simply walking in the room.

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I wrote that a month ago, before the harvest poured in, and I stopped running for two and a half weeks to make room for the flood of ending-summer chores.  Last night I ran again for the first time.  It doesn't take much to change the face of things; two and a half weeks is all.   A few weeks ago, I ended my run in full light, and now I end in darkness.  Night peels back the layers and leaves the beautiful bones of things.  It began with a tawny harvest moon hanging low, balanced large and heavy on the eastern horizon, offset by the last smoky line of sunset burning in the west.  As I ran to the crest of the hill, a shooting star streaked past.  On my return, one bat darted overhead, and I saw the dim outline of a buck pooled in black, frozen in my path but bounding away when he saw I wouldn't yield.

If it weren't for the huffs and puffs of lazy lungs, it would have been a charmed night. 


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And, now, two weeks after I wrote that, running is a foggy memory, I'm ten pounds heavier than I was at summer's end (but I feel at least twenty pounds heavier), and I huff and puff simply moving up the stairs.  There'd better be a biiig baby in here...

Wait-- what?!

Shoot.  I guess that's an announcement, then. 
 
:)