Surviving the "Heat"

It's been a hellish summer here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, but we're not alone in enduring what the sun's been dishing out for the past month or so.  Yes, I've been out on the scooter going nowhere, as I usually am when school is out, but the perceived breeze that comes from moving through the air rather than having it blowing past you doesn't relieve a thing.  In fact, I read some time ago that when it gets above about 95° F the "wind chill" factor actually works backwards, making you feel even hotter than the given temperature.  The heat is on!

This past school year was particularly stressful in being that I was the new kid on the block in being moved to an established school.  From nearly day one I looked forward to this summer and prayed that it would be a lot more relaxing than the past two had been with various major issues that warranted a lot of worry.  Here I am, though, half done with said summer and with a new school year looming on the horizon.  I've gone on two trips, one great and one okay.  Next week I'll take my third of four and when it's over I'm going to need some major butt kicking so as not to get into a bleak depression in being on the other side of the halfway point of this vacation.

It was only five springs ago when I first started scootering and it's hard to believe how much my life has changed since then.  I remember when I first got that little Piaggio Fly 50  and rode it home I didn't have much of a care in the world.  I was still at the school where I'd gone as a child and where I had spent 24 years of my adult life as a teacher.  Mom and dad, and all of us were in fairly decent health.  God was in His heaven,  all was right with the world, and I was infinite degrees of awesome in riding around on a cherry red scooter that looked like a toy under my substantial caboose.  

Scootering had been for me, back then, a perfect escape from a life that was nice and easy to begin with.  I get on the beast now hoping for another taste of that unique freedom that riding once provided, only to find that my worries, and concerns, and anxieties too often come along with me for the rides I take.  It was that freedom for which I longed, especially after Christmas when I found myself on the other end of the school year and was counting down the days, but it's now the far side of July and I haven't found it yet.

Yeah, I know all the usual adages.  Life is what you make it.  Make lemonade.  And all that.  They're darned easier on paper, though, than they are in "real life."

Every now and then when I'm off scootering I'll get a whiff of a lawn that had just been mowed and for a little while, at least, it takes me back to the early scooter days when I was much more carefree.  I'm at an age by which I should have everything that's important all figured out, but I don't think I'm any closer to making sense of it all than I was when I got out of high school and started college as a psychology major.  I'll keep trying, though to survive the heat - literally and figuratively.