TWENTY-ONE WINDMILLS

"Out 4 a 5 miler, c u later?" I text to an interesting woman I'd been seeing since the feast of Saint Nicholas.

"Have a good run, the electric blanket's on" she replies.

_______________

It had been a good run since sparks had started flying three weeks earlier. She was wound tight by two absentee courtiers and I was in dire need of unwinding a year after a traumatic marital separation.

"A lonely Saturday without my daughter", she posted on Facebook on a morning that I was feeling the same.

"How about a country drive to a potter's open-house?" I messaged.

"I'm in the shower."

"Be right there!"

_______________

Stretching hamstrings on my mailbox post, I spot the STOP sign in front of her house two blocks away, an inspiration to run fast to get home quickly. 

Setting out down the blacktop, I cut through a meadow where we had walked with her Brittany spaniel on a frosty Sunday morning.

Jogging back into town along Church Street, I try to avoid looking at the little yellow house that her ex-husband still lives in.

Heading out McElheny Lane, I pass the Confederate Cemetery where we had walked on the first white Christmas anyone could remember.

The sun is setting as I lean into the uphill back into town along Route 60. I stop at the western hump above Lewisburg for the 360 degree view of the Greenbrier Valley and surrounding mountains. Standing in front of the Sunset Terrace Motel, where I had slept away those first two lonely weeks after moving out, I spot fiery glints of sunlight on the distant hilltops to the north.

"It's a 21 windmill run" I quickly post onto Facebook before taking off toward town with visions of long slow nights dancing in my head.

"With many more to come" she responds before I even hit the shower.

BLACK WATER

"Old black water, keep on rollin'" sings my new old girlfriend reciting the Doobie Brothers song from our college days as she dips her fingers into the steely Greenbrier River on our May Day run.

_______________

It was her first West Virginia visit and our first public appearance since reconnecting after my heart-wrenching separation from a seventeen year marriage. As 18-year-old freshmen at Randolph-Macon College, she and I had been drawn together like opposing poles of two magnets. Somehow, in the rush of her new friends and field hockey and my football and fraternity, that attraction only sparked an occasional brush at parties. Now our careers and marriages had taken parallel paths but four hours apart. 

The temptation of meeting somewhere in the middle landed us with a dream of a new life in Charlottesville. The only problems I could initially see were two teenagers whose high school lives I'd be leaving by starting over elsewhere. The elder would soon be off to college, but my eighth grade daughter still needed her father nearby.

_______________

The river is still frigid with snow melt from the higher elevations to the north. We turn back south on the Greenbrier River Trail, following the current that is running dark just before the spring algae bloom turns it moss green.

"This is where I almost lost Ella one April" I gasp, pointing out the bluff where her bike had gone head-over-heels to miss her stalled 10-year-old brother. "She was caught by the greening branches on top of that little tree." 

"It's great you were there for her" she soothes, falling into her therapist's voice.

"I still am" I huff. 

On the night she leaves, my middle brother comes to me in a dream:

"Dave, you can never go back." 

I awake the next morning knowing I'm not yet ready for a new life, in West Virginia or elsewhere.