Circumnavigating Intention
A duck can stop you right in your tracks. If you let him.
“Are you okay?” A voice behind me to my left.
I’m lost in catching my breath. Straddling my bicycle sweating and breathing hard in the sauna bath that is outside Florida this morning. I’m sucking down a gel pack. Which is amino acids, sugars, and a slight taste of kiwi. Which is closer to a slight taste of glob. I’m chasing this energy promise with water. “I’m okay. Yes. Thank you for asking.”
“Okay. Good. Well, I just wanted to make sure.”
I wash away the kiwi glob with more water. It’s 9:30 and I’m working on getting in as many Ks as I can before the heat crests the horizon on this planet we now know as Crematoria.
We say our goodbyes and with one good push of my right foot toward the ground I’m back in the saddle chasing kilometers. Thick air dense with that heat an oven holds after cooking a Thanksgiving turkey for five hours. But it doesn’t smell that good. It smells like hot mud and saltwater. Which isn’t a bad smell. It’s just not the smell you expect to taste. That’s the difference between saturated humidity and low humidity. You can taste the smells when it’s saturated.
I’m rolling south on a residential road along a canal. It’s a stretch that feeds into a roundabout…
