Heavy

A short and sweaty walk under the pack after a lapse. I've gained back the ten pounds I lost in the Spring by being my usual distractible self. Follow-through doesn't come naturally. The greenery out there was higher and thicker this time. There's a red tail hawk nesting somewhere along the power lines. It gives a skreee of warning or of protest and follows me, watching from above, until I turn left into the trees. Before I do, I meet two cottontail rabbits hiding in a shaded portion of switchback. They give me ground reluctantly and then only a few feet at a time. Maybe they're hiding from the hawk. The air is thick and sweet with the scent of sweet fern which smells to me like misery and a prison camp. Some old guy saw me covered in poison ivy blisters as a kid and told my step-father that sweet fern steeped into a tea and applied as a topical would dry it right up. It didn't do a damn thing. But we gathered it up and made tea every time I got a case, which was several times a year, for years. I didn't find out until I was an adult that a cortisone injection would have gotten rid of it in a matter or days. That would have meant going to a doctor. Strangely enough, I stopped getting poison ivy like that the year I left home. The walk is a strenuous and sweaty one today. On the way back out, I run into the same cottontails on the switchback and the hawk which follows me out along the power lines. I'd like to lose about thirty pounds I'm thinking. I want to feel lighter.