My Happy Place

After many days at the hospital, I had yesterday off.  Dad has been moved to Providence Care and will be having physio and many other things to get him better prepared to come home. Ron has been hunting every morning and it was a rainy morning and so he stayed home too.  We decided to take our walk to Bon Echo. It was about 17 degrees and the sun popped out on and off.  We had our lunch by the lake.

We also like to walk down to the narrows and so after lunch we headed that way.  The ground was a blanket of fallen leaves.  

We walked along, talking.  A head of us was a woman with a dog.  She was looking down and moving leaves around with her foot.  As we walked, I watched her and assumed that she preferred to cover the dog’s business instead of picking it up.  We weren’t being quiet and so the dog looked at us but she did not.  I noticed that she had earbuds in and so probably didn’t hear us.  We weren’t being quiet and were still about 15 to 20 feet away when the dog lunged and she dropped the leash.  This is the first time that she looked up.  She called to the dog but he came towards us at full speed and jumped up on Ron growling.  The owner came towards us and called again.  The dog ran back towards her and we stood still hoping that she could grab the leash.  The dog turned back towards us and jumped up on Ron again, ripping his coat.  By this time she had made it to her dog and pulled it back.  She apologized but we decided that we didn’t need to see the narrows that day.

We walked down to the beach rehashing just what happened.  It was a beautiful day so we put that incident behind us and hoped that we wouldn’t encounter her again.  We walked out to one corner and decided that we would take the trail instead of the road.  I noticed that Ron had his hiking shoes and I was only wearing running shoes.  It didn’t seem too wet so I thought I should be good.  This trail is a memory from younger years when my family camped there.  For some reason it feels like it has more ups and downs than it did with my childhood legs.  The trail is a loop and we decided to cut it at one point to be closer to where we parked the car.  It was a little steeper and between the lack of grip on my running shoes and the slippery leaves, I ended up on my back.  Ron didn’t receive any puncture wounds from the dog but the log beside me was not so forgiving.  I cut and bruised my hand and feel the effects in my back today.  

When we got to the lake, I cleaned up my hand and we felt that our time to breathe kind of a day was done.

Bon Echo is still my happy place even if we are fighting off dogs and sliding down hills.