Tonight I ran up kmart hill ran all the way to the top. Because let's face it it has been a while since my thighs ran anywhere and it was about time. I was gasping by the time I got there, good, and I stepped in a hole and twisted my ankle and had one bad moment of thinking I was either going to have to wait for somebody to come save me, unlikely, or crawl to the bottom, feasible but not recommended. I jumped on it to see if it was ok and it was. Also when I went down I scraped my right knee which was also good because it has been a while since I bled from there and it was good to feel it sting.

Kmart hill is a good place to take people when you are figuring them out because it's not a mountain or anything but it is still a good climb and there are brambles and ankle holes and pine straw that slides out from under your feet dumping you on your face and all sorts of other hazards. And then when you get to the top you walk over to the end and there is dumb old kmart. And it's not even that far down below, because this is a hilly area and kmart is sort of on its own hill. Sometimes I take somebody up there and he says, or looks at me in a way that says, We climbed panting sweating scraping all this way to get a slightly better view of kmart?

But sometimes I will take somebody up there and she says or looks, Kmart, huh. And then she goes jumping around the rest of the place finding things like the old burnedout chimney from the house that isn't any more, and the rotted out tree with things making noise in it that we all know better than to poke a stick in to find out what they are, and best of all the cemetery, the two dozen unnamed dead people under crumbling stones. And of course there is the view of the whole city that is easy to miss from the kmart side unless you do some exploring.

Tonight I did not walk to the good view side. I sat and looked at Kmart. I felt a little bad about that, unimaginative unadventurous and so forth but there was no one with me to test or impress and besides I was tired and bleeding. It was good just to sit where I wanted to sit. And then I felt kind of proud of myself for maybe not always going over to the edge of the cliff but always knowing how to find it. Please don't think this is a parable; it's just what I did today.

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