Chestnut Gap

 

November 20, 2020

In September four checks were stolen from my mailbox, the envelopes slit open with a razor and the bills the checks were to pay left behind. I thought this deeply weird. Today I received an envelope with my address and “Grace Station Lost and Found” handwritten on it, and containing those four checks and the note “Found in the PO parking lot 11/18.” The checks are in perfect condition, not creased or stained in any way, so I doubt they just randomly appeared in the parking lot. When I reported the incident, the supervisor said of my mail carrier, “Yes, he was off that day.” Perhaps he didn’t mean he was absent, but something else. Someone in the post office pulled this prank, but it’s a failed prank because I can’t figure out the point of it. 

After some computer work, drove to the Parkway and began hiking at Chestnut Gap, heading north, the exact slope that defeated me a week or so ago, and inspired me, once again, to get to the root of my weakness. Made it today, all the way to the top. I’d stopped before less than a tenth of the climb. All the traffic was three young men hurdling past me at a full run. They did stop before the last and steepest slope, because running down that would be like running down a wall. The actual image that came into my head was Patroclus running the walls of Troy. I have never had the wind to run uphill like that, nor the confidence to run down. A tree at the top spreads out at the base, and one may sit as if enthroned in the woodland. Dropped a paper beside that tree, with Jonathan’s name and address on it, to see if by some wild happenstance it came back to him. Note in a bottle at 3 thousand feet. The walk was less than 1/4 of yesterday’s, but equally tiring, because vertical both ways. 

Have agreed to stand for Vestry. I did so, finally, because the “Vestry Retreat” that always sounded so awful to me is made impossible by the pandemic. It took real thought to say “yes.” Can I do it? Should I do it? Only one way to know for sure.