Bookmarker blogging

The long and winding road... leads back to my beloved Prius and up the hill toward healthful walking for my eventual improvement.

Ugh!

Amy and I just podcasted about how we went to college so we wouldn't have to exercise, but unfortunately, our rock-star lives of dissolute pleasure and infinite carelessness have led us to the point that -- ugh! -- we really must exercise.

I know, it sucks, but I have to get through it all somehow.

So Wesley dragged me out to the our municipal park today to get me started on my exercise regiment, and damn if he didn't get me all sucked in by nature and joyful, fabulous flora and fauna.

The Philadelphia park has a 0.6-mile track that meanders up one hill and down part of the other side, around overgrown and misshapen soccer fields, basketball courts without baskets, and tennis courts that are bursting at the seams with weeds. I know there were winters when I ventured out there that held half a tree over the paved track. Now, the park is mostly patrolled by Mommy & Me classes and Loudon County deputies trying to catch high school students and their marijuana dealers.

But oh, that description does absolutely nothing for the reality of neither the workout nor the fauna of this magnificent walk.

I am torn -- seriously, torn -- as to whether or not I should write to the editor of the News-Herald about this gem of a park. It's so magnificent that parts of it smell like the deepest, darkest, most uncivilized portions of the Blue Ridge Parkway. It's so unspoiled by human contact that a pair of hawks squawked and complained as I rounded one corner of the track, trying to lure me away from their nest and -- I am merely guessing -- their delicate hatchlings.

It's gorgeous. It smells like the unspoiled boonies. There aren't tons of athletic yuppies checking their pulses and ruining my good time.

This is all entirely too good to last.

I swear, I really tried to capture both the cries and the images of the parent hawks. My sister Amy is a bird person, and I know she would be enraptured by such sights. I will keep trying to capture it all.

In the meantime, I know where I'll be picking blackberries come July. And I can't wait. If I happen to get healthy from walking in circles while keeping an eye on such delightful rural treats -- well, more power to me.