I am walking down a hallway and I pass Keith Hallum. He greets me but I don't think to respond until too late. I walk down a stairway into a very large and mostly empty room. Someone, partly hidden behind the door frame, is doing something with a bicycle and other items, perhaps bicycle parts, are scattered around the room and arrayed on shelves in front of a door in the far corner of the room. I wonder if I will need to move the shelves in order to go out the door but I am able to exit without moving them. Outside it is nearly dark. I am in one of several rather small fenced yards which appear to be backyards of private homes. Two small dogs rush up to me snarling and barking. I reach down and pet the closer one, a fat low-slung brown and orange job, on his head and he immediately changes, cringing and fawning as if desperate for my affection.
I look for a gate by which to exit the yard and with difficulty in the low light, spot one in the corner. It leads into another yard where several men are sitting on chairs on the lawn. Concerned about crossing their property, I asked one of them how to get back out to the street and he responds amiably, "Go out by the Ash tree". At first I don't see an Ash tree, only two Sugar Maples ahead on my right, then I notice a third tree to the right of the two maples and it is an Ash. A steep bank of fine-grained dirt, actually a driveway, leads up to the left of the Ash. I climb the bank, kicking steps in the dusty soil as I go. I don't know how anyone could use it as a driveway.
Up on the street, it is a bright sunny early spring morning. A big snowstorm has recently blown through leaving drifts of soft snow higher than my head along the left side of the street but blowing the right side of the street mostly clear. I wade into the first drift and trigger a slide of soft snow several feet deep which forms a pile in the street in front of me. I plow through that and begin to run, feeling light on my feet and running easily through the knee-deep snow. At the top of the hill, which is very much like the hill above the house in Jackson, I turn left and run on mostly bare pavement past Overlook. The drifts on my left, along the side of the road by the field, are only a foot or so deep here and they are melting. I am surprised that despite having ALS I can run so easily and I imagine that it would not be difficult to run eight minute miles. I think about my schedule for the day and realize that I can run for at least another hour or so before I need to be anywhere.
Passing the Iselin's house, which has long been uninhabited, I notice that the garage door is open and there appears to be a light on inside. I don't see anyone in the garage but a lawn mower is sitting on the concrete apron out front. As I walked past the driveway and can see more clearly into the garage, I am no longer certain about the light inside; it might just be the sun shining in through the door.