Within You and Without You

Two days ago, when I walked down through the woods beside the golf course and out onto the frozen surface of the high school track, it was covered with about three inches of fresh snow. It was early afternoon and no one else had been there, none of the other fitness walkers who most years persist in this madness until the snow is simply too deep to be walked in.

Last year, I was determined to be among the last of them but there was always the same diminuitive set of athletic shoe prints rounding the track before me until the day I finally decided that my lungs were just too totally effed-up to continue.

In the spring, it was the same thing, "Ms. Tiny Two-shoes" had been there ahead of me and continued to be there, first, until the snow finally melted off and I could no longer tell if she was still laying down tracks just to torture me.

To my knowledge, I never actually saw her and always wondered who she was. There were, of course, a number of women using the track over the course of the year.

There was the middle-aged blonde with short-cropped hair who arrived each morning in a white Camry convertible and never smiled and never spoke. And there was the tanned, slender, and uber-athletic brunette who smiled twice and said hello once.

Why even remember such things when I sometimes have trouble keeping track of the laps I've walked? Maybe because the "mystery footprints" are such an apt reminder that life indeed goes on, "within you and without you..."

LPK
LiveJournal
12.11.2009