Rediscovery
On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the good and kind podiatrist released my left foot from its post-op boot prison and sent me on my way, no walking or other movement restrictions, along with his reassurance that I can’t make the healing bone fragments worse unless I drop something on them again. I felt like Dobby with a new pair of socks and looked like a newborn fawn wobbling its way through the unsteady challenge of making my legs work in rhythmic harmony as I stepped down gingerly from the exam table and headed for the exit. Left foot, right foot, left foot again, right foot again, and repeat.
What the toes have to do with my gait and how my hips are involved I’m still trying to figure out, but we’ll all get there, my bones and muscles and nerve endings and I, moving forward into both familiar and uncharted territories. Which means, I resumed my morning walks with a deep and wide-eyed wonder after four-plus weeks of being sidelined, reluctantly content to look out the windows and wonder what might have changed Out There. I did try one downtown-via-the-bus excursion three weeks into my recovery and couldn’t get to the bathtub fast enough (hard to do while limping) at the end of the day for a soothing eucalyptus and Epsom salt soak. My kind and understanding supervisor approved a remote work schedule until I could more easily navigate the cold concrete sidewalks from the bus stop to the office without cautiously dodging the ice and snow.
On that first reintroduction to the walking paths, it was clear our industrious moles had taken over, enjoying the absence of human bootsteps on the landscape. Hills and mounds were everywhere and frozen in mid-unearthing, creating treacherous speed bumps just the right height to catch the toe of my wellies and send me careening or stumbling. I can’t recall a time where I was more laser-focused on what I was doing, a full-body attentive experience, head on a continuous swivel and eyes raking in all the beauty I’d so longed for while weighted down on the couch with Advil nearby. “I’ve missed you so”, I’d whisper into the woods and fields every ten yards or so and she reciprocated with red flashes of winter’s brilliant cardinals (the birds, not the clerics) and a sharp north wind pushing itself gleefully across my smiling face. Week-old snow still covered the ground and held all manner of nonhuman foot and pawprints to slow me down even more. I saw coyote (more on that in a minute), fox, rabbit, possum, squirrel, raccoon, deer and a few from a relative I couldn’t identify. We’ve always known that more happens beyond our gaze than in front of it out here in the middle of somewhere, but give the wild ones five weeks of unfettered and unwitnessed freedom and some mighty powerful reclaiming goes on. I imagined parties on the paths with their own version of a DJ blaring forest music through the bare branches of all the trees framing the mossy dance floor. From the evidence on the cold ground, it looked as if a pack of coyotes took down or at least feasted on a deer on the ridge just below the sweat lodge circle. I counted three of the poor creature’s four legs scattered as far as the north field (still looking for the fourth one) and its still-meaty spine lay to the right of the short path past the stand of white pines, stark and red against the white snow (at this moment, it seemed wise to look around slowly and carefully for anyone coming back for seconds). I moved forward with a fresh respect for the hardscrabble life our untamed land-mates must endure, and a promise to not add to their troubles.
As of this writing, I’ve made four unbroken treks into the wilderness that is our land north of the house and have come back to the couch with stories, images and lessons only she can provide. The deer trails are clean and wide this time of year, with the snow making them distinct like the chalk outlines on a crime victim. There’s no escape from the reality that food is scarce, shelter from the chill winds even more so and here I am running hot water for a bath simply because I can. It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison, I know—my life of need and comfort against the furred and feathered existence of creatures whose beauty brings me to my knees pretty regularly. But it’s hard not to feel motherly and want to take them blankets and leftover cornbread, thinking I’m being helpful. If I can walk past them without startling them, maybe that can be enough.
All this from a forced hiatus from walking the land, being in close proximity to her mysteries and gifts…it was all I could do not to curl up on a large patch of frozen moss and fall asleep, hoping to be accepted as One of Them, letting them teach me their ways of survival and after-hours play. Would I give up my evening hot bath for that?
It’s tempting, my friends. Quite tempting.
