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Biking for pleasure, biking to get to work, biking to make a delivery. Biking up the steep Old Sauk hill, biking past my old home.

The hot sunny day is making me sweat. Crazy biking. Maybe I should have walked.

Maybe I should have walked. Maybe I should have skipped Estonia, skipped the art show, skipped rolling croissants, or cooking for twenty during presidential debates four years back. I made soup and needed twenty soup bowls. In those days, I didn't hesitate much.


The hill (Old Sauk hill) wasn’t really a challenge today. I had so much energy, so much brute force, killing force that it took no effort at all to climb it.

My old house in the old neighborhood had a new flower patch and while I marveled at its orderliness, I wondered what had become of the 10, 40, 140 perennials I had stuck in there over the years.

My friend and once neighbor talked of changes in her life and I compared them to changes in mine. I left thinking she was on a good track. And that’s not because she is heading with her husband to England next week. Maybe I could say that she is on a good track and therefore she is heading with her husband to England next week.

I visited with my doctor who had read the Doug Moe column and she commented that she always imagined that I had wanted to be a lawyer from the time of diapers. [Truth is, my grandmother boiled my diapers in pots of water on top of a coal stove, having neither electricity nor indoor plumbing to help her along.] I filed that into my storehouse of stories of what people found most surprising after reading the Doug Moe piece. One colleague mentioned that she wondered why I could not jump into journalism given my constant movement between Poland and the US. Another colleague said he never knew I was such an interesting person. Hmmm.

On the ride back from the far west side, I stopped at Owen Woods.


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Owen Woods – the place where I went to find something, back in the days when I lived so close to it. Something? What? Imagined balance. An echo of my own thoughts.

It was pretty today, after five, tea time five, just before the news five. I caught glimpses of the capitol – from the top of Old Sauk hill, from inside the Owen park itself.



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And I caught that afternoon-evening light that makes all lasting bits of summer colors seem faded and pale, in spite of the blue sky, the loud screech of the yellow bird, and the balls of rabbit fur, hiding behind golden stalks of prairie grasses.



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