Spring!

 Last night I squeezed in twenty miles after school. I didn't feel all that great, and I knew that some exercise would help. It did. It's lovely to be able to ride outside in shorts again!

 And here's Freya down at the creek this morning. Happy girl waded through the water.

Just seven days ago, this was us! How easy we forget!

Spring? Biking

So...Bicycling Magazine is hosting a contest: submit 100 words about your favorite ride  (I take that quite loosely) and a photo. I submitted a couple weeks ago, and TODAY (two days before contest ends), I read that I can submit ONE entry EACH day! Holy buckets.
So here's today's entry:

 

I ride to breathe in the seasons: I watch snow melting, mud emerging, the grass and tiny corn plants sprouting, and foals standing on toothpick legs. Geese honk, winging north, and the baby calves bawl. I smell rain coming, lilacs blooming, mown grass, baled hay, and grain drying in bins. I’m in my upper 50s. I ride so I only have one chin and so my thighs don't rub together. It doesn't hurt if I can beat some people 30 years younger than I am either.  Somebody asked me what I use on my face. I said, "Sweat."

: )

Photo by Steve Pottenger

October 7 Mankato River Ramble and other things

Today, I rode as a marshall for the Mankato River Ramble bike ride. What a blast! Great people, good ride, well organized event...just all around fun. I rode to and from the ride, so I got about 56 miles in. What a great day for a ride. 

Below: The FLYING PENGUINS (Jon Anderson at left--Jon is the first person who ever made me think I might be able to be a serious cyclist). 

I met some pretty cool new friends on the ride, too.

And bikes galore at the Rapidan park. Pie from Jenny at the Dam Store. Everybody was delighted.

And entirely unrelated, Tuesday night is the big meeting about the proposed frac sand plant in Lime Township. Now we realize we need to get the TOWNSHIP in charge of the planning...to be the planning committee or to appoint one, so the township can set the conditions for the use permit. Hopefully, a moratorium can be placed on its operation for a year....but that's not entirely looking hopeful.  More research needs to be done FAST!!!
Mankato Airport, Tuesday, Oct. 9, 7:30 p.m. EVERYBODY can come!

Harvest and Cycling, my autumn treasures

Autumn has a way of making us pensive, don't you think? Of course, it makes us aware of the passing of time. This year, it's all the more true: my son is getting married in a week, and my grandson turned one year old this past week. But I don't feel old. I just feel as if I'm gathering more information about the world inside. I can only, only hope that makes me a better writer.

I get up a little slower when I've been sitting on the floor, but otherwise, I still feel as physically capable as ever. Maybe I'm fooling myself. But then again...I had a happy realization while cycling last week. I love watching the long shadows during an evening ride in the fall. What I don't love is that dark comes so quickly. Twice this year, I've squeaked home on my bike in the throes of darkness. A couple near misses. Time to mount my light for safety--just in case.

But watching my own shadow, I snapped this self-portrait.  I remember how when I started riding fifteen (!!?) years ago, the guys' long shadows were so smooth; their long shadow legs looked like smooth, fast pistons stretching out, up and down the ditches as we passed. Mine looked awkward and certainly not smooth by comparison. Last week, I watched my shadow and made this happy discovery: lo and behold, somewhere, somehow in the last decade and a half of riding, my own cadence has become smoother. My legs looked like pistons, too. I'm going to relish that realization.

Then again, there's the beauty of harvest. It's sad to me because it means soon the fields will be bare and brown-black although there's a certain beauty of bounty in that, too. It also means the long Minnesota winter is too soon upon is.

The harvest itself fills my heart so full that sometimes I think it will burst (to embrace a cliche). Riding my bike alongside tractors, golden beanfields, or a combine like the one in this picture I took last week reminds me of the richness our soil still holds (IF we take care of it). The smells and sounds wash over me with memories: walking out to Dad's combine in my Halloween costume to show him my ghostly self before we went trick-or-treating; riding rounds in the combine with him, working aloud on my Confirmation memory work; just riding, my forehead pressed against the glass window (exactly as Lainey does in Jake Riley: Irreparably Damaged), watching the grain or corn wash like a wave up into the combine header.  And those glorious last autumns at home, when both my brother Bill and Dad were out in the field and they trusted me to do the chores all by myself. I felt so useful. What a good thing to feel.

There was the night when I was probably sixteen when I drove the Cub Cadet into the hog lot with a cart full of 5-gallon buckets of feed, and realized I couldn't back it out without the cart twisting sideways.  I was utterly stuck. What did I do? I emptied the buckets, fed the pigs, and then straightened the cart behind the little tractor by  herking it around by hand so I could back out. I don't think I ever told Dad or Bill about that and here I am, publishing it for the world. I still can't back a wagon or a cart to save my neck.

But I can ride my bike down county highways, flanked on both sides by golden, browning fields of grain and corn, and breathe it in, and be glad to be this tiny part of the plenty of the earth.

Good week

Gearing up for some book events in July. New Ulm Public Library has a cool website. I'm there on July 15.

This is my birthday week, so on my birthday yesterday, I rode 55 miles -- Eeek. That's a mile for every year. Muddy, wet, rainy, windy, puddles, grit, but I did it.

Wrote all morning, then rode, then met my writing group for a birthday party/goodbye party for dear friend Jann who is moving to Fargo-Moorhead this weekend. Then Tom took me out. What a great birthday.

Now: back to writing.

Giro d'Italia

So, the entire time I was in Italy, I kept watching for signs of the Giro d'Italia. This was as close as I got. The Liquigas van passed us on the way to Milan. When we stopped for lunch, the Geox TMC vans were at the same truck-stop cafeteria. I got to meet the guys driving the van. We were in Milan two days before the final Giro stage ended there.

Death in Italy

Wouter Weylandt, a Leopard-Trek rider (my new self-proclaimed favorite team for the year in pro cycling) crashed and died today on stage 3 of the Giro d'Italia.

I feel a strange kinship...since I'll be going to Italy by the end of the race. Such a sad, sad day for cycling.