While the Sun Still Shines (Excerpt)

Today's hike is Mount Sanitas again, and this time we're going all the way up to the summit. It's a good trail, steep enough in places to make you feel like you're earning the gorgeous view, but not so long as to utterly wear you out. Katie would disagree with that last bit. She starts grumbling before we reach the first scenic overlook. "My feet are killing me," she says.

Inwardly, where no one can hear me, I groan. And so it begins. Not that grumbling is unforgivable or anything. I've done my share of grumbling, God knows. Sometimes the grumble is just in your brain, taking up all available space, so loud you can't even hear yourself think, so you say it because that's the only way to get some peace and quiet inside your skull. And someone else'll say, "Oh, me too," and there's this moment of sympathy and commiseration, a sort of We're all in this together moment. And it ends there.

And sometimes you say stuff like that when you're all relaxing over beers after the hike, and it's not really grumbling, really, more like a kind of bragging. You're showing off those sore feet or twitchy thigh muscles. They mean that you worked hard. You did a strong, bad-ass thing. You earned those aches and pains.

But it's neither of those when Katie says that kind of thing. It's an honest to God complaint. She says it loudly. She'll say it again. And again. That first grumble is like a declaration of war.