Being As Charming as I Can While Enjoying the Outdoors

Everyone seems busy these days, although that may just be a misimpression that I have.  I, the normal hermit who has not felt housebound at all during the Pandemic, still have projects that I must work on and complete.  While I do my little volunteer activities remotely, they seem to take up so much time.  As an elder my short-term memory and cloudy attention to detail makes me work much longer than in the old days.  Thank God for auto-correct!

When I am done at the computer in the mornings, I return to house duties and finally grab some time for photos.  Evenings are filled with TV escapes.

We have signed up with a local environmental group to promote their land trust by agreeing to do 12 hikes, one each month, in 2021.  They can be a mile or 10 miles depending on the trails that one uses.  We must post a photo or two that the organization can use to promote even more their acres of woodlands on their Facebook page.

You have to respect the ghosts of past owners of the land.

While this sounds like a wonderful idea, it seems in the time of COVID where there is little to do outside, hundreds of families want to participate in the contest and pound the trails.  We did a 6 miler up and down some hills and while that was pretty challenging for me, even more challenging was the muddy slopes where leaves had been ground into mushy clay by hiking boots.  Hubby fell only once and managed to not smear mud anywhere!  I did not fall but clearly looked like a jazz dancer on ice.  Fortunately, we were hiking weekday and mid-day and thus only met a handful of hikers.  So I avoided the embarrassment of old-lady-mud-sledding.  On the return trip, Hubby was smart enough to find two good branches to use as hiking sticks and that made things easier.

It is so much more photogenic and charming when a 4-year-old slides on their butt down a hillside or runs with rapid steps across the leaves and twigs off the trail as they almost crash land to the bottom of the ravine.  Elders, for some reason, are not so appealing in appearance.

We did see some wonderful bits of nature which I have sprinkled throughout this post.  Therefore, you get to see the right-side-up version of our adventure.