I went back out, to climb the 1km hill over again after I finished covering about 18kms of ground. My legs felt funny and my glutes were cramping up a little. I couldn't stop thinking of these hunks of yarn I ran past on my way up the hill. They looked like flowers that had been attached to a wedding car or something. That's what I imagined in my head when I saw them. Flowers. Made of yarn. Cool! I could not possibly leave them in the ditch! It was 9:56 when I left here, and the sunlight was fading.
I parked well back from the bottom of the hill. I couldn't remember where I had seen them. First I'd seen an autumn colored moth in the sand on the side of the road. They came after that.
I walked along the side of the ditch, scanning the ground in the quickly fading light. i found the moth, and picked him up, and thought, okay, one down, two to go, they were just past here. I hadn't started up the hill at this point. I carried this little moth by its wingtips, and kept thinking he'd come back to life. I set him in front of a stop sign halfway up the first hill, at Arden Rd. Still no flowers...I was so sure they were here. I kept on, up the hill. It was becoming so dark that I could tell when I was entering the glow of a streetlamp, and could actually see it fade away behind me, I had to hustle or these yarn flowers would be lost to the night!
This is where I began to really question my sanity, because, so what if they were gone? It felt like a big deal, I had to find them, rescue them. I thought, I should have found the first one by now, as I passed the school in between the two long hills. Maybe someone had scooped them already, damn! Then I thought, they wouldn't have noticed the second one! I will find it! And I trucked on, toward the start of the second incline.
My butt was killing me at this point. When I stopped my run to cool down in the river, I had not submerged my hardworking butt muscles, since I figured that would make the last 1.5 to my house unbearable, wet pants and all. So only my legs got the treat, and as my legs unwound, my glutes wound up, still collecting blood to distribute to the thirsty sinews that weren't drinking it anymore. What a gross picture in my head. I am totally bananas.
As I had just given up, and was now just going to walk up the rest of the last hill so that I would not wonder if I had only just missed seeing them, I saw it. A hunk of something in the dim light between streetlights that was not a clod of grass. I ran to it...or something like a run, a limping Humpback of Notre Dame type of run, maybe. Anyone seeing me in the darkness might have shot me at that point, in that neighborhood, when I bent and clutched the 'flower' in both hands, groaning with the effort of bending. I knew there was one more, though, and finished up to the top of the hill in the pitch darkness. There were no more streetlights. The light from the sky was only in the sky now, and behind the trees, a pale blue. I clumped back down in the darkness, feeling very strange to be seen holding a lump of ratty yarn to my chest like an eager bridesmaid. Because it wasn't fashioned into a flower of any sort, it was only a lump of yarn. And so my mission was a bizarre one, but as I came back down the hill, peering over the edge of the ditch into tangles of grass and thistles, I saw the other 'flower' and grabbed it up alongside the other one, and was infinitely glad. Such a fuckin weirdo. I completed a mission that for no reason at all, meant a lot to me to complete. Some midnight art project that I had to finish...
Fuck, it was a long walk back to the truck, though.
Here they are, my little yarn flowers:
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