Mon Bicyclette

I got a bike, it got hot, things went languid all dolled up in summertime guises, I went riding. Downtown and around, sweat trickling down my spine, sun at my back, sun in my eyes, people speeding past on two wheels and in four, I was looking at the trees.

It was a gift, a good one at that. From my parents, for my birthday. I told the young man I wanted a seat that wouldn't too terribly indent my ass and was just girly and practical enough. And that, my friends, is how I became a bike commuter. A sorta indolent, slow poke, fraidy-cat, relishing the breeze, unhandsignaling (I don't know them and my hands are generally firmly affixed to the handle bars) kinda commuter.

Staked the iris, pulled weeds, learned that the best thing ever is getting high and getting handy with the trowel. The thing about gardens is that it is never ending, I am not sure I had any real clue of the actual scope before I got myself indentured to this house and that yard.

Friday, a marriage. Out at the Edgefield in some place called Troutdale, consider this, during the height of the Depression six hundred souls toiled there, it was the state poor farm, and now it's a Disneyland for the semi-drunkards, a bar every ten paces, gardens abloom. Me and my new friends, we dance, we laugh, I begin to feel forlorn at some point, I start to wish I had someone to dance with, someone to fly my freak flag with in solidarity, I waive it anyways, with decreasing trepidation, because that is what vodka will do, and soon enough it is all alright.

I chastise the groom somewhere past one in the morning for hollering beneath my window.

After breakfast we golf, my brother, his wife, with my nephew in a sling, and two nearlyweds, armed with wedges and putters in flip flops, I without my sunblock will shortly be paying for that oversight.

But I dont care and I wont care, because it is fun and it's beautiful and I need that searing, and I am ever so pleased about my flip flop tan line.

So it goes. I am still as poor as a church mouse and it's not as if I am not going to account for every penny in my head any time soon, but the softening of the season seems to make it just that much more palatable, which isn't to say that I didn't cry in my car on the way home after the wedding.

And now this, one of my (much) younger colleagues has set a tennis date, I fear his emphasis is on date. Oh dear.