Today's excerpt:
She could have driven down to ‘the hill’, but she reasoned
that the walk there would be a good warm-up, and besides that meant she would
have to walk the hill in front of her house on the way back, so it would ensure
she arrived home sweaty.
What was her fixation with sweating today? She thought about that as she headed off to
the starting point. The streets were
quiet, the rain letting up so she was walking through a scotch mist. Another term she remembered her mother
using. Looking around she could see the
valley where she lived was sitting inside a cloud. She was walking inside a cloud.
Sweating. She wasn’t
one who sweated easily. She rarely used deodorant
because she never really needed it. Even
in saunas and steam rooms she had to stay much longer than was good for her to
begin to sweat and even then it was rare.
She had sweated when she had been a runner, but that was a lifetime
ago. Or, so it seemed. No, it was.
She hadn’t been a runner for, what, twenty years?
She had discovered hot yoga about seven years ago – and power
yoga – and the temperature in the room was between thirty and thirty-five
degrees Celsius. She had loved hot yoga,
and she had loved the sweats she got into while doing those classes. Why had she stopped going to those hot
classes?
She thought it had something to do with money – the classes
becoming more expensive, and also the classes becoming more crowded. But really, she had loved them so much. There had been three teachers she had followed,
but two of them had left the studio. Was that it? They had left, so she had left? She couldn’t remember her reasoning anymore.
