“There you are,” she said.
I opened my eyes and turned my head. Like a dream, I saw her in the distance, her hair tousled from her eight mile run, her arms swinging confidently by her side as she took long strides toward me. There was a look of exasperation on her face.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said, “I never know where you’re going to be. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Little did she know (and I did not volunteer this to her) that I was sitting there because I had dropped to the ground in that spot, unwilling to walk further, drenched in sweat, only interested in cooling down and resting while I waited for her Rogue Running group to return.
“I’ve been looking and looking,” she said.
All I could do was look up and wait for her to join me in that shady, breezy spot against that cool limestone wall, which she did in a moment, groaning in relief as she stretched.
“I fell down,” she said.
I looked at her knee that was scraped and her shoulder that was scuffed. Her drink bottle was gravelly, carrying pieces of the running trail that it had picked up when she hit the ground.
“Oh, I’m going to be stiff tomorrow,” she said.
And then she added how she had told her coach about the hole in the sloped trail that had made her fall and about how she had blood running down her leg and how she too was now officially bad ass. She smiled as she said this and as she described how the coach had high-fived her on her new status.
Fair and industrious look out. A new moniker has taken the stage: Bad Ass Trudy.