I was never much for riding bikes. I bought a Nishiki mountain bike sometime around 1991, and anyone who was sort of into entry level mountain bikes in 1991 probably knows that I’m talking about. The bike was white, why I don’t know, but white it was, and I had toe clips on it and a holder for a water bottle that never fit quite right. I remember that bike well. I was driving on Geneva Street yesterday, back from a check on the house project on my way back to the office to check on a house project belonging to someone else. The sun was warm and bright, the air temperature still not historically normal but even the slightest warmth feels much warmer after the winter that we’ve just trudged through. I was driving, thinking of the weather, and watching the kids play along the margins of the road. Some were walking, others were sitting, and many more were riding their bikes. For a moment, it warmed this jaded heart.
Spring is fine now. It’s exciting and it’s fun and it’s fine. But when we were kids, and the weather warmed enough to wake our bikes from their winter storage and scrape off the last remnants of ice from our parent’s driveways to play 21 again, that was really when spring signaled a meaningful change in our lives. I saw those kids yesterday and thought about riding my bike in the spring, the first ride after a long winter, the ride where the bike had to be washed first with water from the sink that was run into a spent ice cream pail. That first spring ride, crushing the shelf edges of the ice that hung out over the sides of the roads while the runoff carried away the last bits of winter into the city drains. I can hear the sound of the spring gravel under my tires now, the feeling that the ice ledge made when it gave way under the weight of me, on my bike.
I’m not really into riding bikes now, but if I were into them, I know for a fact that I’d rather ride them at the lake than in the city.
(Brevity this morning is dictated by early appointments…)