Lord, let there be dirt!

Will summer ever come? My kingdom for dry dirt.

This week, Winter pulled in his teeth a little. The Sun warmed up the concrete and brick just enough to get the melt underway, reflected heat loosening the side streets and sidewalks from their icy, crappy carpet of muck. Overall, there was a certain levity out in the shops and in the cafes and along the high street today. Only two weeks ago we were in the savage, burning blue center of the deep freeze.So today, in the low lying light of the afternoon Sun, I ripped my singlespeeder hardtail up over sidewalks, plowing through bogs of slush, skidding gleefully round sloppy half thawed intersections on the back streets and jumping over, off and around anything I could find or muster.

Funny how that single gear seems a little taller towards the end of winter. Haven't had that bike out of the shed enough it would seem. But no matter how doughy or creaky or awkward I felt, it was all outweighed by the glee of mashing those pedals down, the front knobby kicking up chilly chunks of crud into my smiling gob. The rear end on it's bitched out old jumping slick, fishtailing around like a startled old nun trying to keep her feet after too much sherry.

I came home up my back alley, the alley with the condominiums being built at the one end. The onslaught of a season's worth of trucks, tractors and backhoes have left a quarry's worth of goo down our lane. I, at damn near forty years of age, screwed my face up tight like a little kid and blasted it "hard and headlong" for every puddle of brack I could hit all the way to my garage.

I put the bike away, and snuck in the back door of my own house....covered in soggy grime.

I know that this reprieve from winter will be all too brief. I know that soon enough the icy whip will lash our way and remind us that we have some time on our sentence yet to serve. But today the guards were looking the other way, and I, a humble inmate on a bike, got to run my own asylum for a couple of precious, sacred hours.

Amen.

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