Willa's Journal

I've been walking every evening now for a few weeks. I didn't walk every night while we were on vacation, but when we got home I picked it up again, and depending on how hot it is and how tired I am, I walk anywhere from one to three miles. Last night it was two. The night before, I got caught in the rain, got soaked to the skin, and had to strip off my clothes in the foyer, but that's another story . . .

So anyway, I was walking to in to work this morning from the parking lot, walking up the alley/hill between two buildings. It's covered with gravel, and it's steep, but I walk up it most mornings, and I was thinking how it's getting easier to walk up it without getting winded or having my legs hurt, and then I was looking down at my ankles and thinking how maybe my legs are becoming more muscular and my ankles thinner, and before I knew what was happening, I slipped on the gravel. I tried to catch myself, but there wasn't anything to catch myself on, and I fell completely down.

I always remember this comedy routine by a comic--Sinbad, maybe--talking about when people fall on the ice. A man will fall, and will lie there groaning and moaning and complaining and holding his head, but when a woman falls, she bounds back up, picks up her groceries, dusts herself off and says, "I'm fine! I'm fine! No problem! Nothing happened!"

You feel like such an idiot when you fall down, like you aren't even coordinated enough to just walk.

I fell on my left arm, mostly, scraped it from one end to the other, and the back of my hand. I apparently also kind of folded my right leg under me, because it's a little scraped, too, although not too bad. And I hit my left cheek on the concrete step up to the street. Just a tiny scratch, but I think it's going to bruise. I'll probably look like someone punched me on the cheekbone. And I'm going to be sore--my arm is already feeling stiff. I took a couple of ibuprofen right away.

I seem to need these little wake-up calls about once every six months or so. I still consciously pay attention when I walk down stairs--it took me falling down them three times, though.

Bob said, now I assume you'll walk up the sidewalk rather than in the alley, right? And I said that was my plan, and then he said, oh, but if you walk up the sidewalk you'll have to be careful not to walk out into the street and get hit by a car . . .