Legs and Dogs

      So here I am at 7:30 in the morning out walking. I look like I have a lazy eye, but really I had already been up for 2 1/2 hours and was simply falling back to sleep during my walk. My eyes were taking turns napping. You can see behind me and in the other pictures that I have a pretty incredible place to walk.
     My daughters have early morning orchestra so we leave the house when it is still dark. Because of this, rather than wasting time and gas to go all the way home just to turn around and go back to pick them up, I stay and walk. (I could tell you that I run but that would be a falsehood. I do try to keep a pretty quick clip going and I do attempt to run, but it is more of a lolloping, bounding, rolling motion than a run.) Back to the point. It is amazing to watch the sun rise and witness the transformations of the canyon lands around me from deep blue, purple, pink and then a fiery red. It is quite breath taking. During this 45 minutes of beauty and self awareness, I have many thoughts and ideas come to mind. I am not the only one out there either. There are always the regulars and then every now and then someone different comes out of the blue. We have a strange camaraderie of friendliness and unified purpose and yet, we are stand alones. While out there you feel a bond with these strangers who are there, first thing in the morning like you, enjoying the movement of their bodies as well as the beauty and fresh air around them. It is quite a wonderful feeling to smile and nod, to say hello, to share silent jokes.

 So today, there I was as usual, ear bud in the right ear, left ear free to hear the skittering of bunnies and lizards as I walk by. The air was damp from the past week of it being overcast and even a few rain storms. Simply a gorgeous morning to be out and getting the blood going. The park was actually pretty empty, a very unearthly feeling of solitude as I rounded each bend in the lazy trails that make their way through and around the park. Then I saw my first comrade. He was very tall, maybe 50. A little over weight but hey, aren't we all? His legs seemed about 10 feet tall. He had a tiny little Scotti dog with him and they were running.They would run a fair distance and then stop to walk. In my mind I thought, wow, he is a giant and look at him run. Good for him! I could not help but think about how long his legs were though. I am a whole 5 feet 4 inches tall, I know, I know, pretty tall for my age. But maybe it wasn't just how long his legs were as how much more gigantic he was than his tiny little Scotti. Yet there they were, the pair of them.
     My next time around I noticed the only other person who was there today. An older man, perhaps in his 70's. Not terribly short but definitely not as tall as Mr. Giant. He also had a dog. A big, beautiful black and white dog of some sort of breed. Yes, for me there are just 2 kinds of dog...big and little. Anyways, it struck me as kind of funny that here we had the gentle giant and his teeny dog, and then we have this smaller, older and slightly hunched over man with his big and bounding dog.
    After I had my little laugh about the irony in that, I noticed a girl walking through the park to get to school. Even from a far she seem about 7 feet tall and all of it legs! You hear those songs about long and tan legs. I myself was never gifted with such treasures as long legs, not even tan legs...just stubs. Here was this 6th grader with legs as tall as my shoulders walking across the grass. I would have had to take 3 steps for her every 1. So the remainder of my walk this morning was thinking about how in the world some people get these legs that are like stilts. I have to stand on a stool to reach my dishes in the cupboard and they don't even have to go up on tip toe. I have some nieces and nephews that are so tall you have to tap their toes to get their attention from way up on the clouds. Where do these legs come from? Is their some sort of tree juice that I don't know about that if drunk during pregnancy your kids have long tree like legs? Why didn't my mom have any to drink when she was pregnant with me?

Perhaps I just need to start gnawing on our trees here and there, you know, just a little snack. Do you see what I mean? Some people don't even have to climb a flight of stairs step by step, they just step up and over the whole darn flight. Me? I need a ladder to get from one step to the next. I am going to have to google this and see if there is some way to fix the discrepancy here.