It felt nearly impossible that a full two weeks had gone by when I
set off at 8:05am on a 12-mile run to wrap up my stay in Cheyney. I was
sad, partly because I had to get up early and could clearly see out my
bedroom window that it was beginning to freezing rain, and also because
in general I was not ready to leave home. A large part of this was due
to the fact that, after several months of persuasive hinting, we went to
the Delaware County SPCA a few hours after my morning long run on
December 20th (just to "look") and came home with perfection in the
form of a gray, striped kitten. We have been down to one cat since
Cosette died in June, and No-Tail's obvious grieving and loneliness had
to be addressed at some point. Needless to say, I was instantly attached
to our newcomer, Noelle. I could go on for many paragraphs describing
her adorable face and booming purrbox that goes off on a hair trigger,
but that is not the point of this blog, so I will move on. Still
though...feast your eyes on that....
So
anyway, I went running. I had a touch of a cough since New Years Day,
along with a suspicious number of itchy bumps that prompted a massive
Bed Bug Search and Destroy Operation that turned up nothing but about 20
years of disgustingness that we scraped up from the spaces in between
the pine floor boards. So I was feeling rather sluggish, and still mysteriously itchy. I
decided to not get too creative with my route and just re-do the one I
did last year on December 21st, a hilly 12-miler. I almost felt sort of
in a daze for most of it, maybe because the world seemed so muted and
quiet with the thick layer of clouds bearing down seemingly inches above
the tree line. I took my usual route down Creek Road, continuing past
but wincing a bit at the winding steepness of Locksley Road that
disappeared into the woods to my left about a mile in. At mile 6 I would
be slogging up that hill, but I instead tried to focus on the immediate
landmarks ahead--first the frozen pond, and then the intersection with
Old Gradyville Road, followed by the crossing at Glen Mills. When I did
finally arrive at the "town" of Glen Mills (it's just an intersection
with a post office and an old train station), I could see that the Pig
Out BBQ Pit had unfortunately gone out of business. Nathaniel and I had
always talked about going to this odd restaurant in the middle of
nowhere, but it seems that opportunity has disappeared in more ways than
one now. The road leading out of the town slowly gains steepness up out
of the creek bed and into the highlands, past a point where Nathaniel
and I once had to slowly cruise through in the car to search for a glove
he'd dropped at some point on his run.
At the crest of
the hill, to my left was a sprawling field with a rather striking lone
tree in the middle, and to my right was the Glen Mills School for
naughty boys. I've been on the campus just once, when I had to be
fingerprinted upon being hired at Westtown School...so much for my one
free crime before my prints are in the system. From the outside, the
brick grandeur actually exudes quite a bit of New England prep school
prestige and anal-retentiveness, but who actually knows what the deal is
inside. Nathaniel was once actually stopped by the police while running
in this area, on the assumption that he was one of the delinquent
students on the run. A pretty laughable thought, as Nathaniel almost
never broke rules, although of course the one time he did it occurred in
the form of trespassing on the golf course that abuts the back of this
very school, as it is easily accessed from the train tracks. He and his
friend were caught by guards and hauled onto campus. Apparently they
were told off, but I don't think anything major resulted since I am
fairly sure my parents never found out.
From
the highlands I passed through one of the cookie cutter developments
(this particular one is called "Cobblestones"), freely judging the
blandness of all the identical mansions. I passed an ornate sign for
"The Carriages at Cobblestones," a separate section of even larger
identical houses that are set apart from the rest, probably so that the
super mega rich people don't have to mingle too heavily with the regular
mega rich people. Turning out of the development onto the upper
portion of Locksley is a definite shift in the real estate scene. My
friend Gordon and I spent some time slowly cruising these parts in his
pickup right before Christmas, observing the multitude of Christmas
decorations while categorizing and separating the "classy" decorations
from the far more prevalent "not classy" ones. There is a house on
Locksley that always impresses me with their display, mainly because of
the sheer magnitude of light-up reindeer and plastic candy canes and
creepy elves that scatter the lawn. The apex of the collection is a
life-sized, highly detailed Santa doll in a rather authentic-looking
costume that stands in the center of the lawn. Lest this prize item get
wet, he is surrounded by a box made from plexiglass nailed to a wooden
frame the size of a shower stall, like a life-sized version of those
display cases that you could buy to protect your rare retired beanie
babies in back in 1997. I have run by this house many times in the
summer, and know for a fact that these decorations stay up all 12 months
of the year, although they do throw a tarp over the imprisoned Santa
and bungee cord it so that there is just a giant blue rectangle standing
in the front lawn. "Not classy."
Right
at mile 6, I came down the hellishly steep Blossom Hill Road (every
road here has hills, so if it actually has the word "hill" in the name,
you know its a doozie), which is a relief to go down and not up for
once. Crossing Creek Road, I hopped back on to Locksley to go up the
slow 3/4 mile climb. I was definitely pretty pooped at this point,
mostly just in the legs. The last push up the hill goes by a fenced in
field, and I was surprised to see four cows standing in it--I often come
this way, and can never remember actually seeing any livestock on this
property. They were miniature breeds, although the only one I could
properly name was the Jersey with its beautiful fawn coloring. I had to
stop, and spent some minutes coaxing them over to me. They did come, and
I fed them grass and petted their heads and let them lick my gloves.
They were very cute, and I felt a noticeable rise in my energy level as I
finally continued over the last portion of the hill.
The
freezing rain was picking up and kept pinging painfully off my face,
and I kept thinking about eating breakfast. But I had a few
neighborhoods to go, and I passed the miles by breaking the remaining
route into 3 chunks, as we used to do for the final leg of our drive to
the Nicholson family cabin in Jersey. As kids, the one and a quarter
hour long trip felt impossibly long, so my mom would do as her parents
did and pacify our incessant inquiries of "are we there yet?" during the
final half hour by saying we were either on the Hop, the Skip, or the
Jump. The Jump was the final segment after turning right at the water
tower (or the "stack"), and during my run I decided that the three
housing developments left to run through would be my Hop, Skip, and
Jump. The Hop took me through the older homes East of Westtown, and
after crossing 926 again I entered the Skip, a oval-shaped loop through
clusters of townhouses. And finally the Jump, the development at the
bottom of my street that we fought tooth and nail against the approval
of back in the 1990s at a series of township meetings, hoping for
preservation of the beautiful wooded tract (we lost, and ironically they
named the development "Tall Trees" despite the fact that Toll Brothers cut all the trees down). Out of Tall Trees and up our drive and I was
soon home, cleaned up, and off into West Chester for an appropriately
huge breakfast to celebrate my last day home.
