Early On

Tessmer Road

The fresh, misted and heavenly mornings found me trotting dutifully down the winding clay back roads of Southeastern Michigan, past cheery old barns and through tree-lined swells of greenly fragrant landscape. I ran nearly every day, taking multiple routes and varying the length of each exertion. I absorbed the visual and sensory banquets of each new turn in the road, but soon found a favorite routine and locked into the joy of it.

Tessmer Road was a clay farmstead route on the far west side, often dotted with deer tracks and swept with hawk shadows. I loved the laughing of the crows and the infrequent motorists. The pleasing, mysteriously sinuous ghost shapes of little ground snakes wound through the soft dirt. Evening exertions revealed the bright, iridescent burn of sun dogs flanking the descending sun as its fierce blaze cut through high cirrus. Butterflies hovered in astounding, fluttering masses over breadths of nodding grass, and the little winged creatures engaged with me in a sort of curious dance as I surged along through them. Deer stepped out of the woods flanking the road, their antlers winking with dew, and their eyes huge, knowing and spiritual. The leaves and the branches stretched out in a canopy overhead, and the sky seemed to throw open an embrace into which I ascended, my spirit aching with a sort of overflow that clicked me into place with a great, ancient host of energies. Insects whirred in golden beams of light fractured by the stark up-reaching branches. Flowers blazed, and dazzling, pungent perfumes hung on the air. My breath and my body became a steady mantra, a forward rhythm that poured along faster and faster beneath the trees, past the quaint, sprawling homesteads. The oddly pleasant odor of horse manure, the broad, enveloping brow of the sky, and the climb and fall of the hills pulled me onward. The wind laced itself around me, and as my pores seeped sweat, I found I craved the cool, centering sensation of my skin against the air.