Running

Someone just jogged past my house. I don’t know that this has ever happened before and I stopped my weeding and mowing and tilling- but

not my sweating- to marvel. He was jogging and swatting mosquitos simultaneously, which is odd here in the desert but it’s been wetter than normal.

For a brief moment, he looked at me and probably thought, “why in the hell would anyone do that sort of thing?”

For a brief moment, I looked at him and thought, “why in the hell would anyone do that sort of thing?”

Most of our dogs have been here longer than many of the neighbors, especially the ones who live in the manufactured homes on 20-acre ranches that the local real estate agent can count on for commission when she sells them every year to someone new.

There are pickups and peonies here that are older than the Reagan administration and Lord, how I miss when he was the liberal president the old men grumbled about.

I have no intention of taking up jogging anytime soon. When you think of me, the worn-out joke about needing to run if you see me running because something scary is chasing me is fitting. I’m an incredibly slow runner, so whatever the punchline to that joke is must be a flaming armadillo that has wondered too far north, otherwise I would have met my demise by now.

I have, however, begun to eat more salad and not bake my feelings and then cover them with buttered banana bread. As much.

Even so, I have tomatoes on my plants and know my way around a grill- I also know that there are 23 cuts of beef that are lean and I like mine medium rare, thank you. That, my friends, is enough balance to keep late as the only running I’m doing.