I have started hiking again. After many months of biking, beach sitting, yoga indoors, and other forms that had replaced the simple act of walking under the trees, I returned to hiking.
This weekend, on Valentine’s Day to be exact, a six and a half mile hike with grand views and not a soul in sight.
Hiking reminds me that the only way to get “there” is one “here” at a time, by the rhythm of my own breath and the pace of my own two feet one in front of the other.
This was a place built by women.
She had come to meet a friend at her home on top of the hill. Her friend wasn’t home.
Maybe she’d remembered the wrong day. So she walked down the hill a bit, looking for a neighbor who might know.
Only to spot a woman banging on her water tank’s reverse thread coupling with a hammer yelling, “WHY? WHY? WHY?”.
It was, she says, a sister-in-need moment.
Time to help with the skills she had learned all those summers of her childhood on her uncle’s ranch in Oregon. She knew how to live in the weeds. Always carried a toolbox in her truck. Had one that very day, in fact, just another walk up the hill. She would end up fixing the toilet, too, and staying another seventeen years.