Almost made the Third Mistake

I've read lots of stories about people in peril. They get caught in a flash flood or they see a car barreling down on them. Perhaps they are in a burning building or they see a dog running at them ready to attack. It seems that whenever you hear these stories, the people who survive tell about having to make decisions many times during the experience and if they'd made the wrong decisions, they wouldn't have lived to tell the story. Well, my experience today wasn't nearly that dramatic but I could have gotten myself into a mess.

We've been having dramatic changes in temperature recently where we get snow one day then warm weather the next. But there has not been enough warmth to completely melt the snow and it has been freezing at night. So, there is a lot of ice around. I went out for my walk in the woods today and noticed that the paths were icy. I made the first mistake: I ignored the bad conditions and went anyway.

As I walked, I slipped and nearly fell many times. Also, I found myself in mud in a few places and that was treacherous, too. I wasn't really able to enjoy my walk like I normally do because I had to look at the ground the entire time. This led, partly, to my making the second mistake: I assumed the conditions would get better up ahead.

I stopped from time to time to see if there was anything worth a picture but the woods were completely silent. No birds, no rustling in the underbrush to indicate squirrels or chipmunks were around. I kept going. Then, it finally dawned on me that I was close to making the third mistake: I was going to have to go back through all the mess I had already walked through.

I stopped and decided not to make that third mistake. I took a picture of the path ahead of me (the top picture) and on my way back, took a close-up of the path I had come through to get to this point (the bottom picture to the left). That was enough excitement for me. It felt good to get back on solid footing and into a warm office. The birds will be coming back to the woods soon enough and the path will be much easier to walk.