Lion and Magic Boy

You know how I know this? Because I am now coughing out gazillions of tiny bits of grass after having breathed them in for the past hour. Yay!

Yes indeed, it was time for another bike ride.

Actually, there have been several since the last one, but none were all that noteworthy. Not that today’s was either, except that I am pretty sure I will require oxygen because of it.

So seriously, why must everyone have their grass cut on Tuesdays around here? (And why does everyone here seem to hire people for this? No one can wield a mower themselves anymore?) I awoke this morning being thankful that the grass people here where I live didn’t start at 7 am like they usually do.

But on the bike out in the country, and by “country” I mean a quick and painful 5-minute ride from my door, where suddenly there are horses and geese and silos and hay and grass. Lots of grass. All being mowed. Today.

Cough.

So my ride today turned out much longer than I intended. I turned around looking at an enormous hill stretching up into the clouds in front of me, turned around because I was already tired and I was afraid of that hill, the hill that was there stretching up into infinity and laughing at me, laughing at my paltry winter legs on my frail tiny bike, a hill miles long and miles high.

So I turned around and got to go down the foothill of that enormous hill, which felt very very good until I remembered the hills I had previously been enjoying going down, which apparently I was now going to have to go up.

Ding ding ding ding! Smart, I am.

Hate. Hills.

It dawned on me that I could turn around again, but then I would want to turn around yet again the next time there was a hill and eventually I would end up stuck forever at the bottom right in between two enormous hills, too tired to go up any longer but instead doomed to keep riding back and forth, back and forth, at the bottom.

So I slogged through the hills and hoped to meet the hopelessly slow Bike Riding Couple that I had passed earlier while riding down the hill they were riding up, fantasizing that if I turned around just then I’d be riding slightly faster and slightly less awkwardly than they were.

Instead, I found myself flying, first soaring with the beautiful guitars in this song, and then doubly energized by the empowerment of the lyrics which I seemed to be really hearing for the first time and are quite appropos to certain elements of my life just now.

So things end, and so they begin.