It’s a beautiful morning, the day after daughter Jill’s 29^th birthday. She and her boyfriend John are visiting from Milwaukee, along with Jill’s cats, Simon and George, also known as He-Who-Eats-Anything-Made-of-Plastic and Mr. Yellow Flat Fat Face.

John is in the middle of a regimen of chemotherapy for  blood cancer, and he has to exercise regularly, so he wants to go on a five-mile walk. Jill and Marsha are running/walking in a marathon to help raise money for research and victim support for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, so they are going out for a run.  (When you love someone with cancer, you feel pretty helpless, so sharing the pain by running a marathon is not a bad way to help!) You can help, too:

      http://www.active.com/donate/tntwi/tntwiJWhiteh for Jill, and
      http://www.active.com/donate/tntmi/tntmimWhiteh for Marsha.

Since I’m a few years into survival of my own cancer, I figure that I don’t have to share the pain by running a marathon, but I can take a walk with John.
 

John is game for adventure, so we head off across  the Albion College campus and through a couple of parks and into the country. 
 

We head cross-country through a dewy alfalfa field to check out the college’s equestrian center, walking around the barns and through the barns and on out the drive. 
 

We find our way to a country road and walk along, enjoying the early-turning trees and the fresh country air.  Our feet are starting to dry out from the experience of crossing the hay field.

We see a bobbing head appearing over the top of a hill.  A jogger.  It is Jill.  We wave and she waves and gives us one of those phony “Gee, isn’t it FUN to RUN until you’re ready to throw up!” grins and keeps going.  We, too, trudge onward.

A hundred yards later, here comes Marsha, jogging along. “I’m trying to keep in sight of Jill,” she says, giving us The Grin, and then she is gone.

“This way,” I say to John, and we duck into the woods and climb over and fence and hike down a trail through a woods in the Whitehouse Nature Center, named for my grandfather, which is pretty cool, if you ask me.

Crossing the footbridge over the Kalamazoo River, we stop to look at some ducks and a great blue heron and look down into the clear water at a bunch of fish.
 

As we pass the baseball field, the college team is out for an autumn workout.  There  are few sounds more pleasant than those of  baseball being played on a nice day.
 

Another half-mile and we arrive at the house, greeted by Wrigley the dog, with ball in mouth.  Riley the cat is hiding as usual, and He-Who-Eats-Anything-Made-of-Plastic and Mr. Yellow Flat Fat Face are eating plastic and looking at us with fat and flat face.
 

The kitchen smells of freshly baked bread.  A couple of minutes later, Marsha and Jill come in from their workout. We all survived.  (What a nice word: survive.)

Have I ever mentioned that I think weekends are really, really nice?
 

                                                                by Jim Whitehouse

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