This is a new pair for me: cycling and hockey. But there we were face to face, the bike and the icy pond with its hard surface and three skaters. Along this favorite route of mine, water is usually mixing with air above it; sky and pond reaching for each other. Today a trio of hockey players were carving out skating sounds of metal scrapes and exhilarating breath, hearts pumping, cold air and the fire of that kind of play coursing through them as they hit the puck and raced each other. And there was my own breathing pulling in the cold but warming it as it ran first through my lungs and heart, and then my blood. This is a pleasure of cycling: it is warming, it does make life course through one’s veins in that warm way.
Life around the pond today was these skaters as water birds of winter skittering along, pausing in their different ways to guess at where more sunlight might come from, but mainly pre-occupied with moving. And me pausing from my bicycle flight to look at these other birds in the distance. Today we chose not to hibernate, and decided to move to keep alive, migrating in very small ways but not for any real change of location, just to keep moving…from one end of the pond to another, one riding loop out and back.
And what better day to return to my blog–New Year’s Day–after having spent far too much time away from it. Migrating back. Writing is warming me, too. Thoughts to paper, fingers to keyboard…mind to hand, as the beautiful bicycle builder Dario Pegoretti would say. Here’s to a New Year of many rides, more writing, and warmth in everyday. Emily Gresh
Emily On A Bicycle 