Clicking off Time

She used to compare herself to others, women in her age group, mostly, and in her younger years, junior and high school, girls in her grade. But now she competed only with herself; now that she was forty-something, the new thirty they said, but despite the rhetoric she knew she’d crossed a line. Was this softening competitiveness evolution, or avoidance?

She paced along the rocky perimeter trail, hopping a pine root that looked like a snake across her path; she had snakes on the brain from the moment she entered the forest and heard the animals scatter in the brush. That poem at last night’s reading planted the seed, stabbed snakes hanging from sticks. She felt her toe catch on the root and bobbled forward.

“C’mon, pay attention,” she heard herself say aloud, but softly, so not even the birds could hear. Talking to herself was also becoming a privilege of middle age, she noticed. A bright male cardinal darted across her path, and disappeared into the dense foliage; a washed-out rusty colored female followed.

She was her own coach now, encouraging herself to keep the cadence, relax her shoulders, and use the arms like pendulums, like the Foucault pendulum in the Smithsonian that swung tirelessly, forever their teacher said, on its own even, back and forth momentum, clicking off time.