Path no longer in use Rona Fitzgerald

Hiking, Formerly Known as Hill Walking

(Tilden Park, California)

Walking hills is leisure. Poppies spill through lupine and your eyes pleasure in Shar-pei wrinkles lying golden thick. A coddiwomple deserving a walking stick.

But slip off one syllable like a heel-holed sock and the trek becomes misery: backpacks, boots, supplies to stretch for miles, an ending with the blistered boast you hiked.

Carolyn Martin

(First published in Word Fountain)