This is the 300th post on the blog since I began using WordPress several years ago (Worpress keeps track of such things). For years before that, I used another software that one day went kaput, along with the company that created it.
Can you believe it – 300 posts and I have yet to make a decent point, evolve a consistent style, or say anything you could put on a t-shirt that anyone would care to read. So … the question is … why do it? My answer is perversity. Someone once suggested that I drop the whole mournful project and apply myself to something more useful, such as making birdhouses. My response was the one that I have been using since earliest childhood, and it goes like this:
DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!
YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!
And so it goes.
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Sunday morning we donned our boots and went for the second real hike of the summer. We’ve been careful about Robin’s right knee, which did a lot of complaining in the Spring. Complaining to the point of getting MRIs and making tentative plans for surgeries. On the first real hike of the year, which we did with Elsa and Marc, we just about did the poor joint in for good.
But Sunday, walking slowly and choosing the footing carefully, things went very well for her. In fact, it was me lumbering along that was the drag. There had not been enough of these outings to maintain what passes for conditioning in my own case, so there were many stops to catch breaths, much grunting, and the usual outcome at the end of it all, which for yours truly is nausea.
Yes, friends, getting out there in the fresh air and hitting these mountain trails in joyful explorations stands a good chance of making me feel like hurling. This all happens at about the same moment that I can actually hear my heartbeat in all of its sprightly and slightly irregular glory.
So why continue? Because it has been this way for 50 years and the negative feelings always pass leaving the positive ones as what is remembered.
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From The New Yorker
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Little Home In The Valley 