Freshly Beaten Paths

I put on my very comfortablest shoes and jogged on down the road. The sun crept over the treetops and the air was cool and fragrant. Why don’t I run outside more, I wondered. I usually plug myself into a treadmill at the workplace rec center. Tune out for twenty minutes or so with the readout saying 7.6 mph until I’ve finished ten laps. Very much in the machine. But now I was passing in and out of oak and sycamore drip lines and looking at houses.

Past the old one with the trailer in the driveway and the roof that has taken two years to put on. Lots of people around here are low income but own their house, so their best course is to remodel the place with their own hands, and take as many years to do it as needed.

Past the 1970s-era ranch style with odd angles and decorative stone that spent so many years completely obscured by overgrown shrubbery. It was a mystery house for a long time. Someone had run a chain link fence straight across the driveway and planted oleander all across the front, and the lawn was long and weedy and littered with fallen branches, and the front window was not curtained and had only cobwebs and darkness. But someone has recently trimmed the trees, and there’s occasionally a pickup truck on the lawn.

Past the corner lot with the horses and the stable and the long horse trailer. Said good morning to a pair of puppies who followed me along the corral fence, alternately watching me and chewing on one another’s faces.

Up along a trail into the park, along a path worn into the grass, under the trees and into the quiet wooded space behind the middle school baseball fields. Disc golf targets everywhere. I ran through a group preparing to tee off, good mornings all around. Boom boom over a small wooden bridge, splosh through the mud, up this little hill and that, all under countless oak trees and the fresh green carpet that early Spring brings. Up a slope and into the sun where more disc golfers were warming up, tossing their little Frisbees around. Quite the weekend sport, I’m thinking, and after I cross one more little creek and hit the parking lot I see the long trailer for a traveling flying dog show, and people coming in and out of the restroom as if after a long drive, and banners everywhere for sports shops and so on but especially for the Professional Disc Golf Association. Professional disc golf? Who knew? But it was some big tournament, the St. Patrick’s Classic, with prizes in the thousands.

And then I ran up against the main thoroughfare and found another route home again. Half hour, a few miles, something like; and then out in the fresh air another hour to therapeutically pull weeds. It was lovely and I learned something: I need to run outside more.