Come Walk With Me

Scene from the Morning Mile and a Half

Will you come along with me...

We will watch the budding trees

In the fresh spring-tide,

While the murmurs of the breeze

Through the branches glide.

~From Will You Come Along With Me? by James Clerk Maxwell

Having finished knitting a hundred sweaters for Knit for Kids (more about that later), I've decided that a person can accomplish a hundred of almost anything. It's just a matter of starting and then going on, one step at a time. 

Here are my new goals: I am going to read a hundred books this year, up from 92 last year; walk a hundred (and hopefully more) miles; and get started on another hundred little kid charity sweaters. Why not? Perhaps I'll live to be a hundred because I will have so many things left to do. 

Won't you walk along with me? All you have to do is to figure out the length of your favorite walk (mine is a mile and a half); or you can wear one of those little gadgets that measures how many steps you take. I understand that phones have apps that will measure the length of your walk as you go. Then you can just add up the miles every day.

This is not a competitive thing, no sir! I am announcing my intentions publicly with the hope that I will embarrass myself into continuing toward the goal. It worked with the hundred sweaters, why not with the walking?

I've put a little box down below on the left of this blog called "A Hundred Mile Walk" that will show us all how far I've walked, starting 4/3/2011. There! Now there's no turning back...

Scenes from the Morning Mile: July

The Morning Mile Gets Earlier and Earlier

On these warm pre-summer mornings I'm finding that I need to start out for my walk earlier and earlier. As soon as it is light enough to see and be seen, I take off. That means that while I'm doing the first half of the walk, heading west, the sun isn't up yet. When I head back home, it's into the glare of the rising sun, which is just coming up over the mountains and behind the trees in this photo.

The Other Side of the Bridge

Emma looking embarrassed in those bows from the groomer (don't worry, she took them

out right after the photo was taken)

Another day, another morning mile. This time I took along my pup, Miss Emma. Em was born with bad knees but the vet says that short walks are fun for her and not too painful. Let me tell you, there was plenty of spring in her step this morning when she saw the leash.

Keeping those poor knees in mind, we only went as far as the bridge over the ditch. Along the way we saw plenty of other morning milers--young folks walking dogs before work, older retired couples, and a rosy-cheeked lady on a bike.

This is the view from the bridge looking north, the opposite direction from yesterday's video. It gives you some idea of the birdsong and tranquility of the mornings here, even though you can still hear the ditch pump working away behind me. You will see the trails alongside the full ditch, some recently hayed fields, the Robledo Mountains in the distance, and one of my favorite adobe houses in the neighborhood, surrounded by blooming roses. Oh, and the chile sign, of course--I had to put that in there right at the end for those of you who are far away and longing for our hot green chiles. I actually used the zoom feature on my little Flip camera so that you could read the sign, but I wobbled too much and had to take out that part of the footage.

The Morning Mile

I love that phrase, "the morning mile." I first came across it on Andy Baird's website, Travels with Andy, when he mentioned that he always takes a walk in the morning--his "morning mile." For some reason, that stuck with me and, on all the mornings when I was talking myself out of getting outside for some exercise, I would imagine that I could hear Andy, saying in a matter of fact manner that he was heading out for his morning mile. So why didn't I do the same?

Of course, once I got started, I found that I wanted to go the distance, and even a little more. So, now my morning mile is actually a morning mile-and-a-half, and it passes through some lovely country, with views of fields, gardens, mountains, and horse pastures--places where something is always going on.

When we first moved here, I showed you a photo that I had taken of the then-empty big ditch that runs through this agricultural area, and said that I hoped to be able to show it to you when it was full. I didn't realize that during the growing season the big ditch is always full and farmers on either side of it open gates to flood their fields and orchards whenever it is their turn.

So, here you are. The empty ditch in winter (click on the photo for a larger image):

And the full ditch in spring (adjust your volume):

I Can Walk!

I can walk here!

For several years now I've been dragging my painful arthritic legs around behind me, feeling as though my life had somehow ended way before it should have. I spent a lot of time either sitting or looking for places to sit down, since both standing and walking made me very unhappy. I discovered that people limp, not, as I might have thought, because their legs were different lengths (!) but because their legs hurt them. It was a good lesson for me--not one I asked for, but one that made me mindful of how many people suffer. There were huge mental adjustments to be made, as I faced my limited mobility.

Over the past two years I have had a series of three surgeries, with all the attendant recoveries and rehabilitations and sleepless nights. Stay with me, now, the whining is about to end.

And now I can walk! I can walk without pain or whining or crabbiness! I have ventured out rather cautiously around the neighborhood for the last three mornings, taking my new knees with me and...they work! I've gone from careful stepping to longer striding to a certain jaunty zippiness. I walked first to the nearest stop sign and back, then around the nearest block, and am mapping out routes that will be longer each day.

I can walk there!

Thank you to my family, for putting up with my whimpering and my inability to move around. Thank you to my sister, who acted as nurse and housekeeper and driver for months at a time. Thank you to my surgeon, who is as pleased with my latest x-rays as I am. I feel like I've been given another life.