wear the blood in our cheeks like red roses

First snow out west over the mountains, but it hasn't come in yet. I'm watching it on radar like a creep. Today was good. I had a really nice time getting outside, even if it was chilly and throwing rain in my face the whole time. I guess the long run and afterward wandering gave me a lot of time to think.

I feel like Augusta Springs is mine a little, in the same jokey, earnest way I recognize. My mom used to say Burke Lake was hers back in the days when she would drop my brother and I at our grandmothers so she could get out and run for an hour. Hers like "What are these people doing in my private park?!" on busy days. A good joke for a kid. She would go every day when I was little, if she could, and run it twice to make ten miles. She's said that place saved her life--saved it from us, my dad, everything closing in, I guess.

It's not that Augusta is an escape quite in the same way as running was for her, I don't have little accidental kids. But I do love it so much. It's so quiet and solitary, all my memories there are the happiest, and I do feel like I found it just when I needed it most. I prefer it in winter: the starkness, the cold sharp light, the known path, and the way the clouds sort of slide down to fill it on really bone-chilling days. I always run more than I expect to there because of the way the circle divides up. It's so easy to say, "Oh, I'll just run a little more." I love it best in early March.

I don't do well this time of year. It feels like a confluence; I can't tell the chicken from the egg in ordering the bad things and my terrible reactions that cause and surround them. Am I such a poor little Viking that the sun goes away and I get sick for missing it, or have I just had an unlucky couple winters? What's the normal range there? I guess it's been on my mind recently.

But the thing I kept returning to as I was running today, and turning it over in my mind, was how much it's all my own fault. I have a hard time when I don't listen, pay enough attention, or think about other people's perspectives. I get deeper in when I don't eat and take bad care of myself. I can't not take responsibility for my energy. I don't know if this pops up more in winter, when the light is gone, but it doesn't matter if it does or not.

I see that some things are just lightning strikes. I had one of those last year, with my health, but I also had a whole hell of a lot of landslide I brought down on my own head. I feel like trying to excuse myself because of the freak accidents is missing the point somehow. So, anyway, I know it's not lent, but I really focused today on the alternative of winter crushing. Rather: what I could be doing to make my life a productive thing. Even if I spent every day of the next forever years picking up dumb beer cans, the smallest thing I could do, that would make somebody's life fractionally better. So I need to focus on that stuff, and not trap myself in this sunless mire for the next two month. (Just got to make it 'til my birthday, anyway, and then it'll start getting lighter. Plus then I'll be too old for it to matter.)

In the meantime, I need to remember to be thankful. So that'll be my month.

On...sort of an unrelated note, I have a backlog of dumb pictures, so here they are:

Halloween front porch.

One of the only trees that hadn't peaked was the red oak. The drive was just through a forest of blood.

Doesn't it look good enough to eat? It's almost certainly frost-killed by the time I'm typing these words, only 6 hours later.

So true story: I used to be afraid of this plant (some kind of sumac) because when I was little (like first-memory-near kind of little) I reached out to touch one, and a wasp was sitting on it, and stung my fingertip. And from that day forth I haven't touched this plant. Until today.

Spoils to decorate the mantle, trash bag, rage lines, running attire.

I love sycamores this time of year. Better than weirwoods.