That word again.

This evening's 3 mile run felt fine really. A bit of indication from my right knee, but more of the variety where one hasn't been running in nearly a month, rather than the variety where one hasn't rested enough from the marathon nearly a month ago.

So it was fine. Well, I mean, I felt fine. Well, I mean, save for the part about how the vegetation on the usual course had changed significantly from a month ago. Everything is dry now. Everything is leafless and dead like. I mean, I know it's not dead. Just, you know, turning in for the evening of winter, as it were. Winter. Gosh, I don't know if I'm ready for winter.

Not even a few hundred yards into the run, there is this milkweed seed struggling along the road just ahead of me; a large stand of milkweeds, pods dried and cracked open, line the roadside here. The wind puffs this seed as it hangs and drags its hope and future along the apparently significant and grabbing pits in the asphalt of Old Cass Road. I like to watch milkweed seeds fly, so I take it up and cast it to the field-side of the road and resume my jog. Engagingly, it floats quite a long way along with me at nearly equal pace, before succumbing to the fate of gravity and finding its new place in the barely green straw and grass. Maybe it'll make it. I hope so. It represents the underdog will upon this mid-fall evening, so I hope it will.

About halfway into the run, a dried leaf-laced breeze rushes across me and reminds of a time over 20 years ago, cutting wood with dad on the mountain at the Spanishburg farm. It smells just like that, and I can hear the chainsaw, see the sawhorse with its cuts, the truck tailgate with its dents, the wood chips all over everything. All in this instant and memoried winter's warning breeze.

Crossing the Deer Creek bridge on the straight of Rt. 66, I look left and right, and left and right, and left and right for that rather large black bear I saw run across the road here just last week. I would like to see it again. Nope. Not here.

Then I am home. Strangely, by my perception of elapsed time, as if picked up just past the bridge and dropped at the stairs to the house. One of those "fast" runs, as far as the mind is concerned. Three cats there to greet me, their winter coats pretty well established. There's that word again. Winter. Gosh, I don't know if I'm ready for winter.

DF