Second Nature: A Story About Returning to Running in Covid Times

It’s my first time running in eight years: I begin by walking up the hill under a tent of trees and top out at Woodman’s Cemetery, where I start my run in earnest among tombstones and pollarded trees, where the lanes are flat and whirr politely beneath my feet; then, I head out to the main road, downhill all the way to the sea and the village-by-the-sea, where I catch a glimpse of someone I know bundled up against the frigid air, sitting under a tent, sipping hot cocoa, and I’m happy to see that she’s not wearing a mask, so I won’t have stop my run to talk to her or to anyone else I might pass along the way, for that matter, and all the while I’m running, I’m marveling at how wonderful it is to run again, how natural it feels to keep my distance, this proper, prescribed distance, from people I know and to finally recognize that even when I wasn’t running, I was always running.

[LSS, 12/1/20]

How Do We Explain the Lost Year? 

Have you counted the number of slices in that “uneaten” pizza on the train station wall? 

There are only MMXIX.

One of the passengers must have been hungry.

[LSS, 12/1/20]