I wrote the blog yesterday.  It was a cranky blog—a growly bear kind of blog.  And then, at Bill’s suggestion, I thought about it over night before sending it to be posted.  Guess what happened?  This morning I took a page out of Thumper’s father’s book:  If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.  

At which point, I deleted that blog.  After all, who wants to read a rant over their morning coffee?

So yes, let’s go back to the issue of 10,000 steps.  Someone sent me an article this week, explaining that there’s really no magic to the 10,000 steps routine. The idea of 10,000 steps being good for you emerged from Japan in the 1960s, and whoever came up with the idea settled on 10,000 because that’s an extremely favorable number in Japan.  The point is, if you’re only moving 900 steps a day, bumping that up to a couple of thousand—as many as you can physically manage—is a big improvement over doing nothing.  And although the idea of all those steps may have come from the other side of the planet, on this side, it’s making a big difference in the size of my hips.  For the better.

Right now, I can physically manage 10,000 steps.  That’s my base.  I try to lay that down in the morning.  After that, however many steps I do in my regular and more than somewhat sedentary life, are gravy.  Which is why my monthly average right now is 12,289.  But make no mistake.  Walking 10,000 steps—5 miles, give or take—takes time when you 70 plus years-old.  Two and a half hours right now.  Longer if it gets too hot.  When the fish start poking their little orange heads out from under the rocks in the pond, I know it’s time for me to be off my walking path.  If their water is that warm, that means the air too warm for me to be marching around the yard.

What this adds up to, however, is that I’ve spent far more time outdoors this spring than I have since I was a little kid clamoring barefoot over the rocky formations in the desert pasture land that was “up across the road” from our house on the edge of Bisbee.  And it’s been an interesting experience.  Starting out early, I watch the shadows from the tall trees next door gradually retreat across the lawn.  I enjoy the changing shades of green in the various plants and changing colors of the blooming flowers as the sun shows up. I watch the fish venture out from their hidey holes.  And over the past month or so, I’ve kept an eye on an industrious mama bird who built a nest under the white coral bells in the one of the pots on the front porch the moment the planters were filled.  We watched her build the nest, lay three eggs, and look after them.  We watched the eggs hatch and now, just this morning, we saw the mother bird herd her fluttery little chicks across the driveway and into the relative safety of the row of arbor vitae that line the drive.  

But what really caught my eye this morning was the rose tree.  It was here long before we were, planted on the north side of the pool house in a spot where it never got any sun.  It grew straight up as one long, ugly trunk in a desperate attempt to reach sunlight.  Only when it topped the edge of the pool house roof and emerged from perpetual shade did it finally spout any branches.  Most of the time, the leaves on the scrawny lower trunk were covered with ugly black spots of blight. Actual roses never appeared before the last of the summer—in late August or even September.  We could see that the roses were bright pink, but because they were beyond the roof line, we couldn’t really appreciate them.

Last fall we asked the gardener to transplant the tree to the other side of the garage—to the south side, the sunny side—and it’s one of the plants I’ve been watching change colors in the dappled sunlight of my walking mornings.  It’s no longer a single stick of a plant.  It has branches—healthy green branches with lush green leaves and with one long stem blossom waiting to bloom.  All that poor rose tree needed was to be transplanted to the right spot.  

And that made me think of someone else who was once in dire need of transplanting—me.  If you’ve read my book of poetry, After the Fire, or heard me speak, you already know that the last few years I spent working in Phoenix were tough ones.  I was in the life insurance business back then and struggling with whether or not I should divorce my husband.  If I was on my own, what would our lives be like?  Would I be able to support my children?  And once I got the divorce, I couldn’t stand to stay around Phoenix and watch someone I still loved destroy himself.  The only course of action left to me was to get out of Dodge.

That was the first step—making the decision to move and then carrying it out.  It was a hot June day in Phoenix as I loaded the last of the boxes into the U-Haul trailer.  The very last box happened to be one full of bedding.  Once it was inside, the door wouldn’t close, so I hammered away at the contours of the box with my hip until the door finally DID close.  And then we drove out of town.  On that day I was petrified.  I had never driven a car pulling a trailer and didn’t know if I’d be able to manage it.  I didn’t know what lay ahead in life for any of us, and it certainly never occurred to me that, after making that scary move to Seattle, I would soon embark on my lifelong dream of becoming a writer.  And it never occurred to me, either, that four Junes later I would meet Bill or that we would fall in love, marry, and have thirty years together (so far) with kids and grandkids and a wonderful home and garden and life.

None of that seemed remotely possible as I drove west on I-10 toward California on that hot day in 1981.  None of it.

Then, gradually, my dreams started coming true.  I wrote and published my first book.  I met Bill.  In 1986, six months after we married, we went to Arizona to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.  While there, I took Bill to the insurance office where I had worked for more than five years in the late seventies and early eighties.  We went there because I wanted to introduce him to the people I had worked with during those very challenging years, but do you know what happened?  None of the people in the office recognized me.  In the five years we had worked together, they had never seen me smile, and they had never heard me laugh.

People who hear me speak now know that my laughter is back.  And so is my smile.  Just like that rose tree by the pool house, I had to be transplanted to the right place—in this case, rainy Seattle—for the black blight to go away.

That first tentative step taken so fearfully in 1981 was the one that now makes it possible for me to be out there taking those “favorable” 10,000 steps each day, walking in a yard full of wonder and beauty, of blossoming flowers and rushing water.

I’m extremely grateful, for all of this, and it seems to me that reading about the importance of being transplanted might be a good thing for my readers to encounter over their Friday morning coffee.

It’s also possible that out there among my blog readers are people who are stuck in troubled relationships who are asking themselves the same kinds of tough questions I asked myself over and over back in Phoenix:  What will happen if I leave?  Will I be able to survive?  Will anything good ever happen to me again?

I’m sure being dug up out of the ground was a shock for the rose tree last winter.  And leaving Phoenix and everything familiar was certainly a shock to me, but if being transplanted could work for me, it can also work for you, and I’m also sure you know who YOU are.

The trick is taking the first step.  That’s the hard one.  It gets easier after that, not all at once, but it happens over time.

One step.

Just one.