Early Autumn Musings

It was seeing Facebook posts of snow pictures yesterday, by some of my friends in outlying municipalities, that got me off my lazy duff today and out on the scooter.  I realized in seeing their photos that my days of riding are numbered until the start of Spring next year, and in the realization of that I felt that yearning in my bones to be out there on two wheels going nowhere but loving the going.

That we didn’t have a lot of color in the deciduous trees getting ready for Winter this year would be an understatement.  There was no “peak viewing week” this time around.  Most of our trees went from verdant green to that blah toasted look without showing the beautiful rich yellows, oranges, and reds to which we’re accustomed and which delight us most years.  I’ve heard it was because of too much rain this past summer, and that the unseasonably warm temperatures hung on way too late, but who knows?  It made the few and far between gorgeous trees all that more precious to see where they could be found.

Although it was still in the low 40s when I ventured out this morning I was determined to get at least as far as one of my favorite places to ride to, the county park across the river, a mere seven miles away by my usual route and a nice place to dismount and play with the camera a little.  Thank heaven that a bright sun was shining as I rode, allowing me to soak up some warmth in spite of the cold air rushing past me along the way.  As an unusual streak of good luck would have it, the place where I like to stop on a small sidewalk island near some benches and trees featured a magnificent red tree where I could take a few pictures.  I often feel self conscious setting up a tripod and making selfies with the scooter and me when others are around, so an added bonus today was that I had the place all to myself.

On the way back home I realized that in the summer when the sun is doing its best to make squinting necessary I’ll often stop for a traffic signal a little short if I’m able to stay in a spot of shade, but at this time of year I’ll try to position myself so I can stay in the warmth of a good sunbeam while I wait for the light to change in my favor.  It’s all about being in the right spot at the right time, I guess.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” is a quote from somewhere in the Bible, and I thought of it this morning when I looked down to see that my odometer was about to cross the thousand mile mark since I got the Piaggio back from the shop in August after its having been at the mechanic’s for three months.  It was then, in about the third week of August when I visited the shop and saw my engine apart as if it had exploded, with most of its doo-dads and thing-a-ma-jiggers scattered about on the concrete floor, when I seriously feared that it would never go back together nor work again.  I couldn’t imagine that any person, no matter now knowledgeable or skilled, would possibly be able to reassemble the whole mess into a working entity.  God bless Mike for knowing what he was doing even after I’d given up all hope of getting my scooter back in working order.  Crossing that thousand mile mark this morning was another small thrill that made the whole ride much better than it should have been.

I’ll hope to take my traditional Thanksgiving Day ride in a few weeks to the cemetery where most of my departed family members are laid to rest, to offer thanks in the presence of their interred bodies for their having been such blessings to me when they were still with us.  I have to hope that after I become a guest in the cemetery myself someday, my kids will enjoy going through all the pictures I’ve taken and remember their old man always as I was in my happiest moments, as somebody who loved life and who knew that riding a scooter was even more fun than it might seem to be.