May Slowed Me Down. That’s Okay.
I want to talk about May.
Not the pretty parts — the wildflowers and the longer days and the way the trail smells after rain. I mean the real May. The one that showed up at my door with a full suitcase and stayed longer than welcome.
It started with work. I went on a two-week rotation that had me driving into the office every day instead of working from home — which doesn’t sound like much until you factor in the commute, the schedule disruption, and the way an hour of your morning and an hour of your evening disappears and takes your energy with it. I came home tired in a different way than hiking tired. The good kind of tired — the kind that comes from moving your body through something beautiful — was completely unavailable to me. This was the other kind. The kind that just sits on you.
Sydni wasn’t doing well. My sweet senior boxer has significant health needs that require around-the-clock attention some nights, and May was one of those stretches. If you’ve ever loved an aging dog, you know the particular exhaustion of middle-of-the-night care — the listening for sounds that shouldn’t be there, the interrupted sleep, the constant low hum of worry underneath everything else you’re trying to do. She is worth every bit of it. But I won’t pretend it isn’t hard.
And then my grandmother passed away.
Her name was Thedious. She was 91 years old and she spent every single one of those years giving. She was the oldest of nine children, raised four of her own, and poured herself into every grandchild and great-grandchild she was blessed with. She was a devout Christian woman whose faith wasn’t something she talked about so much as something she simply was — in her actions, her patience, her quiet consistency, the way she showed up for people without being asked and without keeping score.
She picked up five of us grandchildren every Sunday and Wednesday and took us to church with her, even though our mother didn’t go. She talked to us about God and the Bible. She hummed hymns while she worked around the house. She played Christian cassette tapes in the van. She tended her flower beds in the front yard with the same care she gave everything else in her life — steady, faithful, unhurried.
She was not outwardly effusive. She didn’t pepper you with hugs or say I love you constantly. But her love was never in question. It showed up in everything she did, every day, without fail. That kind of love leaves a mark.
I flew to Texas for almost a week to help take care of things and attend the service. It was the right thing to do and I would do it again without hesitation. It was also one of the most emotionally exhausting weeks I’ve had in a long time — grief compounded by family complexity, which anyone who has navigated loss inside a complicated family will understand without me having to say more.
I came home depleted.
The rain didn’t help. May in Virginia this year seemed determined to keep everything gray and wet, which made getting outside feel impossible on the rare days I had the energy to try. I got on my walking pad a few times for a mile or two. It kept the wheels turning but it is, as I have said before, supremely boring. I made it to Lone Star Lakes a couple of times. That helped more than anything.
There’s a version of this post where I apologize for falling behind, or make promises about doing better, or spin the whole thing into some tidy lesson about resilience. I’m not going to do that.
May was hard. Life got in the way. That’s allowed.
What I keep coming back to is something my grandmother embodied without ever saying it out loud: you just keep going. Not dramatically. Not with a speech. You tend your flower beds. You pick up the grandchildren. You hum your hymns. You show up for the next thing.
She was secretly a little afraid of the unknown — of things she couldn’t be certain of. In that way, honestly, we were more alike than I realized. And yet she showed up for her life every single day with grace and steadiness and an open hand.
I think about that on the trail. The part of hiking that nobody talks about — the part that has nothing to do with gear or mileage or elevation gain — is that it asks you to keep going anyway. When your legs are tired. When the fire road feels endless. When you’re not sure you have anything left.
You just keep going.
I’m going to try to be a little more like Thedious.
I’m sorry I didn’t call more. I’m sorry for the miles between us in the years after I moved to Virginia. I hope she knew. I think she did — that was her way. To love you steadily and without condition, whether you showed up perfectly or not.
Rest well, Grandma. I’ll be thinking of you somewhere on a mountain in August.
— Barbara
