It's been raining for kind of a ridiculously long time.  Not continuously, but never stopping for long enough to have a nice, clear day either.  It's - dreary.  Maybe of a different variety than the several weeks of snow that preceded it, but all in all it's been kind of a long time to go without a lot of sun.  But - wonder of wonders - even though it's still raining, it's significantly warmer than it has been, and that makes it springtime rain, which is much less depressing.  It's finally the sort that melts snow, instead of just compacting it and weighing it down and freezing it into sheets of ice, and she's going to take the opportunity to go for a walk in the woods while she can.

This turns out to be a bit of a mistake: she expects her winter coat to handle the warmer temperatures fine, but it turns out to not be the relevant sort of waterproof and it gets drenched in a way that makes it heavy and stick to her arms in pretty short order.  And even though her boots are the sort to have a pretty good grip on ice, the same can't be said of the slightly absurd amount of mud she has to trek through and she almost falls twice.

After the second time, she decides she should probably head back even though she's only a third of the way along her usual route.  She reaches a hill that she had a heck of a time climbing up on the way out here and is not quite careful enough going down it.  She slips, and this time she does fall.  All the way down the hill, and past it a bit, into a pond by the side of the trail.  It's cold cold cold, and she can't get her footing on the slippery bottom for the longest time, and she has a really hard time of not panicking even though she can make herself survive on the air she has for as long as she needs to, and when she finally resurfaces -