Thursday, June 6, 2013

A perfect night for a run

We went for a run tonight and it was absolutely perfect.  The weather was beautiful - not too hot, not too windy.  The sky was a pristine blue with puffy white clouds.  The scenery was beautiful - classic Kansas farm ground and pasture land on all sides of our gravel road.  The icing on the cake was meeting a really neat couple who were driving by when we stopped at our turn around.

A side note:  You should know a few things about our run.

We took off on a three and a half mile run.  At about the half mile point, I asked my husband if he had gotten a run in earlier in the day.  He said he had and I asked how far.  He responded that he had run to Westmoreland and back earlier in the day - six miles!

I have always told people that he is a superhero.  The superhero council convened and told him that he needed to marry a mere mortal to diversify the gene pool and he picked me.  Who else runs almost nine miles a day?

Further evidence...we ran a little further and I said how glad I was that my knees weren't hurting tonight.  He responded by saying it was the opposite for him, as his knees were really hurting.  He thought it might be from the strength training he did the night before and the 2,000 jump ropes he completed.  Geez.  I don't stand a chance of keeping up.

Along the run, he did something that I love and tease him about all the time.  I call it lies cross country coaches tell.  He will often tell me positive, encouraging things that aren't quite true.  He will tell me that it is the last hill or that we don't have that much further to run or that we are almost finished with the run.  He is a cross country coach and I hear him yell these things at his runners and we all know they aren't quite true.

This was the perfect run.  And, it just got better.

At the T in the road, we planned to stop and turn around.  My husband asked if we wanted to walk to the south for a little ways, but I told him I just wanted a quick rest and then to run back to the house.

We saw a minivan approach and instead of taking the turn, they slowed and drove towards us.  We got a little nervous since we were in the middle of nowhere and did not recognize the vehicle.  We sometimes see some characters driving around in our area.  We have some stories.

The van approached and we saw an older couple inside.  The lady yelled at us and asked us if we were lost.  My husband responded by saying that we weren't and he asked if they were lost.  The lady said that she thought we were someone else and they said that they had land a little further north and west of us.  We explained that we lived down the road in the old Jenkins school.  She lit up and told us that she attended school there in the 1940's and she had always wanted a tour since it had been remodeled.  We offered our phone number and told her to call us the next time they were in the area and we would show them our place.

She told us a great story.  She hated the high windows in the school because if you need to trace anything, you put the paper up to the window and because the windows were so high, you had to stand on a school desk to reach the window.

We told her that we had photos of some of the classes from the 1940's that were a gift from another neighbor.  She told us that she wore her hair in pigtails and would have been about 10 to 11 years old.  We decided that if she contacts us for the tour, we would have her sign the back of the frame with the photos of the school and students with her name and the year she attended.

The couple told us that they met on a blind date.  My husband told them that we met on a blind date, too.  They laughed.  The guy asked my husband if he was drunk and when he learned he wasn't, the guy laughed and said that he was when he met his wife!  All laughed together and wondered if being drunk or not impacted their decision to go on another date.

I loved that when we asked for some paper and pen to pass along our number, they used an old calendar.  Have you seen those adhesive calendars that are advertising for local businesses with the pull off calendars?  She pulled off a page and said she thought she would use it because it was from December 2012.  This reminded me so much of my grandparents.  They always had those calendars stuck to their dashboards.

We really hope that they call us and we get to visit with them again.

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