Friday, October 5, 2007

Weakness and Glory


I've given up the search for superlatives and adjectives for this glorious Fall weather. I'm just reveling in it as much as my health will allow.

Wanting to snap a photo of our home from across the road, thereby showing the flaming hillside behind the house, I stepped through the dried grasses and trod along damp deer paths. It's not far. I only walked perhaps 150 feet. I snapped the photos.

Then I looked wistfully behind me, back toward the bewitching creek bottom that I had explored briefly last week. I thought to also take a photo of those Fall colors and maybe the pine-needle-covered part of the trail that is guarded by Ponderosas.

I walked another 100 feet to the point where the trail sloped downward slightly. I took two shots, but I knew the one I wanted was where the path entered the mysterious darker woods. I looked and saw the exact place I wanted to record for my personal history. It was only about 150 more feet, down a slightly sloping trail. And I thought, "No, that would not be good. I would pay with some bad symptoms if I tried that."

So, I looked away, back toward our house, but the Siren Song called me back, and like Lot's wife, I looked again down the path, just toward the object of my affection, the piney woods. My thigh muscles ached and my bones all flushed with weakness and though my body sort of tilted in that direction, good sense won out and I turned back up the hill toward home.

I'm down to walking only 250 ft away from my house...and back...and that trip will put me under.

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