Bear Crossing
by
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Tuesday, March 18
Tuesday began without me. I was still groggy with sleep when I began to hear people stirring in the kitchen. I showered quickly, making a mental note to make time to run later. Polly was gone so I made up the bed and dashed down the stairs. I found Myra and Polly together in the kitchen. Polly gave me an impish grin while I tried mightily not to blush. Myra, fortunately, missed this exchange but then, just as I was beginning to relax a bit, Mike strolled in wanting coffee. Polly gave him a big wink and rubbed her jelly-covered fingers across her cheek indicating the not too obvious evidence of my close encounter with Mike’s heavy beard the evening before. This was too much for Myra to miss. At first she looked puzzled and then it dawned. Her lips disappeared into a thin line and her eyes literally bugged out, giving her the look of some unfortunate soul with Graves’ Disease. By now Polly resembled a Cheshire cat and Mike was looking at his feet.
"This," I warned them all, "is not for public discussion," then I left the room. I had decided to run after all. It was going to be one hell of a day.
As I pounded past the Coast Guard Station, extending my normal run, I was repeating the mantra I had devised during my first years at the Crossing.
I am Kate McKenzie.
I live as I choose.
I am beholden to no one.
My values are my own.
My choices are my own.
I am Kate McKenzie.
I live as I choose.
This was once my means of justifying myself to myself while I adjusted to a world that was not built around the needs and wants of others. It was a frightening time for me, a time full of uncertainty and a hopeless feeling of being without direction. I had thought that time long past and myself now immune to the uncertainty born of the opinion of others. But here I was again pounding and repeating:
I am Kate McKenzie
I live as I choose
Shaman had taken the unusual position of running at a close heel this day, perhaps, anticipating the need to protect his sprinting, mumbling mistress from men with nets. As we made the turn toward home he bounded ahead seemingly confidant that the worst of the danger was now passed.
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About the Book
Current U. S. Bureau of Census statistics indicate that there are forty million women in the United States between the ages of forty and sixty-five; an additional twenty million over sixty-five. These women have committed to relationships, raised children with varying degrees of success and participated in the workforce in a myriad of capacities. They have loved and lost; fallen down and gotten up. In short, they have lived. They have experienced the dissatisfaction of necessary compromise; the regret associated with mistakes; and the sometimes horrifying consequences of decisions which, perhaps due to the exigencies of life, are made without adequate consideration. They are no longer young, smooth-skinned and enviably proportioned; and, given the chance, many, perhaps most, would not choose to be so again in exchange for all that they have become. They understand that the desire for physical love does not necessarily diminish with age, nor are its pleasure lessened by the less-than-perfect appearance of one’s partner. These women, like most readers, often choose a novel for the story they can recognize, the character with whom they can identify. Bear Crossing is such a story; Kate McKenzie such a character. She is flawed, vulnerable, human. She is us.
About the Author
Seeth Miko Trimpert, a Registered Nurse and technical writer, has twice been recognized by the National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW) for her fiction work – once in 1999 for her short story "The Widow" and again in 2001 for her second novel Hard Over. Ms. Trimpert is now a member of the NLAPW. Married to a military officer, she is the mother of three grown children. She has lived and traveled throughout North America, Europe and the Western Pacific. Currently, she and her husband divide their time between their home on the Withlacoochee River and their sailboat in Key West. Bear Crossing is her first novel.