Taking Action

I have a personal trainer! Well, if your bones are crumbling to dust you need to look sharpish at your muscles. Puny legs and floppy core won't cut the mustard when you're teetering on the cliff's edge and one false move means you're over the top. I exaggerate, but I feel a strong urge to toughen my body up, the bits I can anyway. A horrible episode the evening after I began taking the very powerful meds that rebuild bone density left me feeling very shaken, and I've been walking with a tall stave ever since, a long slim branch of a tree. It's not like a walking stick: I'm not disabled. But it gives me confidence and I rather like striding about the fields and lanes like a shepherdess minus the flock.

I woke this morning to a white world, the heaviest frost so far and it's finally done for the dahlias which can now be safely lifted and stored. I slept deeply and heavily but Hugo was still curled up in a cosy ball when I emerged after 8am, both of us blinking at each other. How can he possibly need so much rest? He's back to getting down from his sofa and greeting me like a long-lost friend after a period of just opening an eye, wagging his tail a fraction and going back to sleep. But why does he always choose to shake his head wildly the moment I bend to kiss him? It hurts, the whiplash of ears flicking across your cheeks, but neither one of us ever anticipates it. I realised his coat was in the car when we set off for our walk, so he stood in the sun beside the garage door as I retrieved it. But he was trembling all over despite the warmth, his poor thinly covered body reacting to the chill in the air like a highly-strung racehorse. I quickly buckled him into his sheepskin and rubbed him all over until he was cosy and we set off. He seemed impervious to the frost-hoared grass, cantering along and stopping to sniff as usual. We both often paused to look, him for hares or other quarry, me to take it all in and file it neatly under Things To Recall in January. I just hope my filing system works in two months and I can retrieve the sense of pure joy I relished today.