100,000 Miles

It is increasingly beginning to appear that I am like the dependable little car that ran quite reliably (yes quite reliably, thank you) for many years, then reached 100,000 miles and ... had every single thing go out at once. 

Battery. Transmission. Spark Plugs. Blinkers. Brakes. All shot. Maybe the whole engine.

I'm afraid that is me!

And I'm only in my 40s for crying out loud. (Though it is the latter end of my 40s I suppose.)

But I thought ... well, no, I never thought about it at all actually. ... But if I had had a thought about it, it would have been a thought like this: "I will run like a top until I'm 80."

Only now?

On top of my troubled Achilles, and my tonsils having needed parted with, my TMJ has been acting up rather badly, I had to go to the eye doctor the other day after accidentally scratching my cornea (I didn't know I had scratched it, I thought something was stuck in it!), I wake up with my limbs tingling or numb several times a night, I've begun experiencing occasional tinnitus (rare, but alarming--no pun intended), and I recently injured my knee and may need surgery to repair a torn meniscus.

What's to be made of all this? What is to be done? It's an entire list! Just like that little Peggy Ann McKay.

I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I'm going blind in my right eye. ... 

Except I don't think my troubles will all disappear the minute someone tells me it's Saturday.

Still, it would all be tolerable (not overly tolerable, but tolerable enough) only ... running. 

Running!

If only none of it were interfering with running.

"Mostly," I told the knee doctor, "I'd just really like to be able to keep running."

(Knee doctor? [I suppose he has some more formal specialty name than that.]) 

"Yes," he shook his head and waved his hand. "You all do. Whenever I'm driving home and see someone out running, I'm tempted to just pull over and give them my card." (As if to say--"If you want to participate in that activity, it's my office where you'll end up.")

But he did tell me that my knees do still look to have few good years left in them, and that I am lucky to have run so much for as long as I have. 

And I know. 

It's true.

It's true! 

What an amazing blessing to have run through all the seasons -- seasons of weather and seasons of life (including 10 pregnancies!) -- for so many decades!

I am grateful!

But that didn't stop me from calling Mike the minute my appointment was over to moan that nothing else gets me outside so regularly in all sorts of weather, and nothing else opens my mind so, well, openly in prayer like running does. (Something about that in and out, and in and out breathing, and the steady strike, strike, strike of each footfall. It's almost meditative.) 

Mike, stinker that he is, suggested the perfect substitute: feeding the animals at the farm (outside, and in all the weather) while praying ... for our chickens. (Haha. Oh our poor chickens! We've even installed a coop door that automatically closes at night. "What more could I have done for my vineyard chickens?" But somehow they keep getting eaten. We think it's a combination of this fellow [who we have caught multiple times now on our game cam] and ... neighborhood dogs.)

Perhaps, rather than this feeding-the-animals substitute for running, I should just be put out to pasture altogether! It appears to be the direction I'm headed.

Though, truth be told, there is something about feeding the animals. (Shhh. Don't tell Mike I said that.) Especially, oddly, in the cold of winter ... and if dusk happens to be falling. It's not at all fun, mind you. That's not the word. Your fingers freeze trying to break ice or hold metal bucket handles, your arms and back ache carrying water, hay gets stuck in your clothes and makes your eyes itch, the grain can shrinks onto its lid in the cold and becomes impossible to open. And yet ... I can't properly word this at all, you likely won't know what I'm trying to explain, but you feel like you are watching yourself from a different place when you are out there in the dusk and dark, somehow remembering the chill of those nights and the sound of the cows chewing their grain (such a homey, comforting sound), even though you are doing it at that moment and it isn't memory yet, but reality. It's as if time shifts. And some future you is remembering these moments of chill, dark nights, your breath on the air, and crunching over stiff grass or frozen snow to the animals.

(Here Starling and Hans are the other evening. I'd loaded the kids up in the van to drive to the farm with me for animal feeding. It was cold and I'd told them to keep in the van, but the two of them ran out to the dock [Starling in Mette's shoes] while I gathered eggs from the [remaining] hens.)