Ladysmith

I didn't leave South Hill until Tuesday afternoon, and made only slow progress for a while, meaning that I had to walk late into the night. At some point, maybe around ten or ten thirty, still several miles out of the next town, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and looked over to see a fawn laying on its side in the middle of the opposite lane, kicking its legs. My first reaction was to turn my head away and keep walking, but twenty feet up the road I swung about and came back. The fawn, still splashed with spots, lay with its right eye swollen up badly, its head bruised and slightly bloody. I picked the poor thing up and it thrashed hard in my hands and cried out little neighs, and I laid it back down in the grass on the side of the road. I poured a little water in its mouth, then just stood there for a minute or two, quietly watching and unwantingly judging its chances. Without knowing anything else to do I walked away.

My feet have their good days and their bad days, their good and bad weeks. The heat, which yes, is back, doesn't help them but I find ways around it - walking in the ditch instead of on the pavement, or on the white line instead of the shoulder, or on the yellow line down the middle, even. Sometimes, too, I've gotten in the habit of pouring a little bit of water in the dirt and making mud, then stomping around in it until my feet are covered. No tactic helps for very long, because conditions change quickly, but together they get me through.

The insects have been bad in Virginia, so far. I have woken up on several mornings to find ants swarming inside seemingly every nook of my backpack, and I pour them out in cupfulls and dance around to keep from being bitten. Flying ones, too, harass me as I walk, and I've pulled close to two dozen ticks of of myself in the last ten days or so.

My spirits, I think, remain high on average, and the seperation that I described in my last post seems like an old and unneeded vice. Yes I'm talking to people every day and yes I enjoy interaction at every level. Of course I'd rather not have to scrounge for my daily social requirements, but I take what I can get.