summer ride

Yesterday I went for my first ride of the summer, hoping to cast off some of the weight my spirit was feeling. The sky was cloudy with only the slightest threat of rain. It was neither warm nor cold—a nice in-between with a mellow breeze gracefully blowing through the trees, across my knuckles and up my unbuttoned thick leather cuffs.

As I got up to speed, wind whistling through my helmet, I breathed in a wonderful strawberry-vanilla-honey scent, warm and soothing—intoxicating really. I couldn’t be sure what it was until I rounded a bend and, down-shifting, a vast field of clover spread out before me. The blanket of faintly lilac-pink colored blooms was dotted with lanky bobbing yellow blossoms and bent pale-tasseled grasses. Serenity.

I passed a tall maple rising majestically from a roadside knoll, its stark ashen-gray fingers spread against a gleaming silver sky. It appeared as an inverted lightening bolt, its foliage long dead and stripped of bark revealing a beautiful smooth sinewy form. I wondered how long it would stand—had it already been standing. I thought of Calvin's seizures.

My mind drifted from its troubles the further I rode on, passing a weathered zig-zaggy split rail fence, then a neat white picket and finally an old field stone wall covered in lichen. I had to chuckle when I motored by a beaten, rusty yellow sign that read “SLOW CHILDREN PLAYING,” a tangle of raspberry vines inching in on it.

At last I flew over a small hill coasting down its other side and settling onto a thin peninsula, which opened to a wide inlet. The sky glowed like white-hot embers that touched a pewter sea. I cut the engine. Silence.

I wished I could remain there for a longer part of forever.

detail, photo by Michael Kolster