Delusional me

Me in 1985 capable of doing marathons and triathlons at a good clip

There once was a time that I would never leave the house without a good base of foundation covering up any imperfection on my face. I look at my bare face now and think..not too bad; I don't need foundation anymore. Now did my face suddenly become smooth as silk with age? Probably not. What has changed is my eyesight. I no longer am able to focus on things as small as pores. No one else probably could that is older than fifty either. I suppose I could do a reality check and ask Naomi as she is brutally honest but, I'm not in the mood.

And the running. I still think I am doing it though my times are getting slower and slower and slower. I have lived in the same area for a long time and have a good memory for silly things like how many minutes to a given intersection. What remains the same are the number of minutes I run. The watch does not lie. I tried to run while doing chemo. It was so hard. I would run for a mile total trying to get 60 seconds in without stopping. Sometimes I would need to stop 15 times just to make a mile. Now I can run (or whatever one might call this motion) 90 minutes before I need to stop.

And my body. I think I don't look all that bad and then I see photos of me...

It is a cold, crisp fall day. I ran by a small herd of deer (3 does..where are the bucks?) in the neighborhood adjacent to mine, closest to my house yet. Further deep in the woods I stopped to hear snorts (probably a buck) but the vegetation was too dense to see anything.

I was watching House Hunters the other night, international edition. They featured homes in Abruzzo where I had stayed 3 years ago. One house was rejected as the countryside around it were chock full of adders. Poisonous snakes!! I didn't even consider those as I was running cross-country on the sides of the mountains there. I worried about being gored by boars, a bit nervous when I saw the wolf, concerned about scorpions that I found around the monastery where we stayed but never considered snakes.