susanstinson

I oiled my trike yesterday. Did I get all the right parts? I'm not sure. It's making all sorts of creaky noises these days, but I'm accustomed to them. I put vaseline on the rust on the fender, as recommended by a friend. I put bike oil on the chains. The rear wheels are the noisiest (except for the brakes when I need them on a hill: they screech, and people stare, but they continue to slow me down, and the bike shop could offer no help on this), but I wasn't sure where and if to oil them. Maybe the noise from behind is the basket, slipping. The seat is squeaky, but that, I feel, is inevitable.

Last night I had mackerel, white bean salad, zucchini and artichoke salad, and a lavish tossed green salad (contributed by an organic farmer), lime cake and local strawberries with friends. Plus, wine. It was so good, and the company was good. It made me grateful. Then I loaded the two versions of the manuscript of my novel I'd been lugging around, the new have-a-heart trap (I miss my cat), the mixed nuts I'd meant to leave with my friends, and all into my basket, got onto the wide black seat with its puddles of rain, clipped on my lights, and rode the length of the Florence bike path in the deep, deep dark. I saw no other bikes, and just one walking man. There were a few glints of fireflies, amounting to a patchful in one spot. There was an orange barrel with reflective tape over the big pothole I hit hard the last time I rode the path at night. I pointed my light and looked for it. I was going fast, for me, and if I got a little scared by rustlings that sounded full of intent, I went faster. It was so dark. In some stretches, the leaves met overheard. The glow of the twenty-four hour Stop'N'Shop at the end of the path always seems welcoming to me, although it means I have to hit the dangers of King Street.

It's been warm this week, so warm that the ground between the shared storage area where I park my trike and the street has been muddy, and I've been leaving deep tracks that fill immediately with water. Today, there's supposed to be ice and snow, up to six inches.

A couple of days ago, though, when it was just wet, after I left my groceries on the stairs, and was wheeling my trike across the street to lock it up, I noticed the tracks. The two rear wheels are fixed and make straight lines, but the front one had been turning sinuously from one side to the other, so it looked like my trike was writing big S's -- my initials! -- on the road.

I was coming home from the grocery story (It's cold out there these days. I'm still not ready. I can only find one glove. Also, the pedalling seems to be getting stiffer, a little harder to do. I don't know why.), and just as I got to the sidewalk in front of the school across from my house, there was E. from Food For Thought, striding with such specific elegance down the sidewalk, calling my name, bringing me a book I had ordered, on her way to other lovely places. It was really great to be handed a book I'd been needing out there in the air.

Admiring my trike, E. told me that a friend of hers had rigged up a blender powered by a bike to make smoothies, and another was helping to design bicycle ambulances. (I don't know any more about it, but that's was she said.)

The book is Malian's Song by Marge Bruchac, which is a wonderful children's book based on an eyewitness Abenaki account of Robert Rogers’ 1759 raid on the Abenaki village of St. Francis. It's outside of the time of the novel I'm writing, but it's helpful to get more context for Abenaki domestic life of the period and to pay attention to the differences between the British military accounts of that attack (which I'd just read), and this Abenaki account.

On the way to the store, I had been taking the route I always take, past the graveyard, which I think is one that the Edwards household used to use to walk back and forth to where they kept their livestock on the minister's sequestered land, once they got use of it in 1741, and just as I was riding on the uneven, bush-narrowed sidewalk before the turn to go under the railroad bridge, just below Edwards square where their family house used to be, I saw a man with a big gray beard riding in the street, coming from the other direction, look at me a little funny, then I turned the corner, and there, under the bridge, the dark, sheltered part where I'm always trying to manuever past broken glass, where the street feels much too narrow to join the cars, there, right in my path, was a couple, kissing and held close together in a way that made it possible to see the feeling between them, to be reminded of feeling something like that myself. I slowed down almost to a stop, wondering if I'd have to speak, but the woman saw me, and gently guided the man to one side, it didn't seem like an interuption, but a brief drawing apart, and he had a big laughing kind of smile on his face, without actually laughing. They were still holding hands, and stepped together again in their long dark coats as I passed.

The end of most of my trike rides is a quick roll down the skinny black asphalt sidewalk that gets so slippery with ice in the winter, then I check my mail and stop off at the wooden stairs to leave my bags, groceries, swim stuff, whatever I've got, then ride across the street and maneuver between a yellow mini-bulldozer called a uniloader, which is parked next to a cement mixer beside the old big garage that lost one of its walls last spring. There is barely enough room for my trike to fit between the blade of the uniloader and the garage, and if I'm off it, I have to walk backwards, pulling it by the handlebars. If I'm on it, I have to time it just right so that the pedals are even and as high off the ground as they both be for the part where there's a very short, very steep drop off of the sidewalk before I hit the little stretch of rutted grass where I have to turn around to back the bike in under the overhang next to the deflated rubber raft, where I lock it to a pole and cover it with a tarp.

Several of the men and boys who live in these apartments use that space to work on their vehicles or store their stuff or take a short cut to the basketball hoop, or just hang out on the lawn chairs, and they like to tell me that I need a motor on my trike, or make jokes about me getting speeding tickets. I don't mind, really, although sometimes it makes me shy. The space makes me think of my grandfather's shop and shed in Texas, where all manner of work, discussion and viewing of each other's activities from benches and lawn chairs were-- and are still -- done.

Today, after a good day of writing at my friend's office at Smith, I came home through the grey early evening, the sky still sputtering rain, and me singing, badly, but listening to Nomy Lamm in my head:

Ohhh, I'm going to take you home tonight
Ohhh, down by the red firelight
Ohhh, we're going to let it all hang down
Fat-bottomed girls, you make the rocking world go round.

I rode to Florence and stopped by the bike shop to ask about some funny sounds, and had to leave it there! I was stuck with my bag with my swimming stuff -- but, with no trike, no way to get to the pool! -- and a bag full of writing stuff, including a gargantuan Works of Jonathan Edwards book, my sad helmet and my little insulated zipper lunch bag, and had to wait for an hour for the bus, and then trudge home in the hot sun with all that stuff from the Academy of Music.

He has to open the crank. I can pick it up on Friday -- if I can make it on time by bus. I can't bop to the store for milk or glide the long way downtown singing Rhinestone Cowboy between the highway with its vehicular music and the langorous, rippling fields.

Guess what just got a mention in Alison Bechdel's blog?

Clue: it's shiny and red and tippy and broad and goes like the wind on a sunny spring day. Also, it's developed an odd click when pedalled that I need to get checked out.

It was so good to see Alison yesterday, and her slideshow and talk were stimulating and funny. She said about drawing that looking at the world and working to see what's actually there, not just what you expect to see, is a political act. I love that so much, the enormous power and meaning that can rise from just using the senses and trying to accurately convey what you see. And I love that she articulated it.

A beaver swimming towards me in a leisurely way in the swampy pond next to the bike trail behind the StopNShop. And a flock of robins.