Three Sundays, Empty Trail

The cedar smell arrives before anything else — damp wood and something green underneath it, the trail exhaling the night's cold as the sky began to separate from the treeline. She notes this. Five-forty-two a.m. The path empty in both directions. The specific quality of silence that exists only at this hour on this mountain, which is not silence at all but a layered absence of human sound, birdsong threading through it like a fact.

She has been up this section of trail three Sundays in a row. She knows the root that crosses the path at the first switchback, the exposed rock shelf where the trail widens, the way the cedar scent concentrates here because the canopy closes. She has sat on this rock twice before with her pack between her feet and her hands in her lap and done nothing. Noted the wanting. Catalogued it. Filed it under: not yet.

This Sunday she had packed differently.

The sundress had been deliberate — thin cotton, small flowers, the kind of fabric that doesn't weigh anything, that moves when she breathes. She'd registered the hem against the backs of her thighs on the approach, the slight cling of it as the trail steepened. The fabric was warm from her body by the time she reached the rock shelf. She sits now with the pack open beside her left hip, both feet flat on the ground, and she makes herself be still for a moment before she does anything else.

The trail is empty. She checks it the way she would check a fact.

Her hands are in her lap, right over left, resting on the dress where it pools across her thighs. The cotton is warm on top and cooler underneath where it touches her skin, and she is already aware — has been aware since before the trailhead, if she is being honest, which she is — of the heat further up, beneath the fabric, that has nothing to do with the climb.

She exhales. The breath comes out longer than she put it in, unfolding into the cedar-smelling air, and she watches it disappear.

The pack is open. She knows what is in it.

She has carried it three Sundays. She has noted, each time, the specific weight of it at the bottom of the pack — not heavy, just present, the way a fact you haven't written down yet sits at the back of the mind. Today she will write it down.

Her right hand lifts from her lap. She is aware of the left hand remaining — pressing, without intending to, slightly against the fabric across her thigh. She is aware of the hem of the sundress where it lies across the middle of her thighs, of how little it would take to shift it. The cotton is so light. Almost nothing.

She reaches into the pack.

The cedar smell is still there, exact and undiminished. The trail is still empty. A bird she cannot name is doing something precise and repetitive in the canopy above her, and she notes this too — the sound, the interval, the way it continues without caring what she is about to do.

Her right hand closes around what she came for.

She does not take it out yet. She holds it inside the pack, her fingers learning its shape again, and feels her left hand press more deliberately against her thigh — not moving, just present, just weight — and the breath she takes in does not come back out the same way.

The hem of the sundress is three inches from where she needs it to be.

The trail is empty and smells of cedar and she has been patient for three Sundays and her left hand is already shifting, the cotton lifting, the cool morning air finding the inside of her thigh before anything else does.