The Living

"She saw a white horse roll in wild strawberries, and stand up red. She took part in the great drama. It had been her privilege to peer into the deepest well hole of life’s surprise. She felt the fire of God’s wild breath on her face."

(Annie Dillard, The Living)

--

We rode our bikes around town last night because anything was cooler than sitting still.
The air streamed over our shoulders as the humidity clung to our lungs, breath by breath.

I saw our shadows, two figures hunched over frames, as the cicadas sang in the twilight. A lone moped shot past us as we pumped up a hill.
"This is summer," I thought. "Here we are, in the middle of it. We are dead center.

Last summer, the transitions of new town and new marriage combined with individual quests to prove ourselves worthy of adult jobs forced the summer to pass swiftly and, months after, I felt as if we had missed the majority of its simple pleasures, distracted as we were by future dreams.

This summer, we’ve treated this warm season quite differently. From attending weddings every other weekend, to planning a real honest-to-goodness vacation for the end of the month, we are attempting to suss out summer life as best as we can.

That’s why we took an evening bike ride on the hottest day of the week.
To remind ourselves that we are part of the living.
And that summer won’t last forever.