The River of My Neighborhood

The last days of February held promise for milder days, so I removed the handcycle from the stationary stand in the garage where I had ridden it all winter. I inflated the tires and adjusted the brakes. It was road ready. The early March weather was still breezy, damp, and chilly, but turning warm enough so I could ride on our neighborhood streets for the first time since winter’s blasts.

Because I am a T 5-6 paraplegic, I ride the handcycle for better cardio-vascular health. Riding on the stationary in the garage is the same motion as riding on the streets, but more difficult because there are no downhills on which to coast like there are on my road course. Also, there are no chance encounters with neighbors who may be walking their dog; and no neighborhood views to observe. So, I was full of anticipation on Monday morning as I dressed for the first neighborhood ride of this new season.

Each loop that I ride is just over a mile, and during the first one I was too busy being certain that the handcycle was functioning safely to see much other than the road in front of me. After all, any fall on asphalt promises road rash, but for a paraplegic such a fall guarantees more than ripped skin. So, I was cautious as I enjoyed the rush of spring wind across my hands and face.

After that initial “run” of sorts, I settled in on this spring maiden voyage around the neighborhood and noticed two houses for sale, many bright yellow daffodils standing erect in mulch beds like short sentinels, bare forsythia bushes somehow managing to send out small yellow flowers, and a cherry tree in a side yard that was just beginning to show soft-pink blossoms. Yet, sight was not the only way of marking the approaching spring—bird song filled the air. At the corner of Jackson and Jefferson a male cardinal atop a budding sugar maple called for every female in the area to come see his plumage, and robins bounced in air and on lawns as they battled for nesting position. Bird song announced the death of one season and the arrival of another.

Seeing the many earthworms crawling across the streets that had been driven from the rain-soaked soil reminded me of what I think could be the best question ever asked of a teacher. My friend and fellow teacher Bill Hiatt, a 7^th grade science teacher, shared how one spring morning during first period a student who had walked to school, asked, “Mr. Hiatt, do worms migrate?” I applauded Bill then, and still do all these years later, for congratulating his student on being observant and asking a logical question based on his observation. If the worms the student had seen crawling along the wet sidewalk weren’t migrating, then what were they doing. After all, there is no such thing as a “stupid question;” perhaps a needless one, but never a stupid one.

Worms. Flowers. Birds. Cherry tree blooming. Houses for sale. Memories of a thinking student and his wise teacher. I even met a sister of one of the neighborhood walkers who lives in the Chesapeake county where I began teaching– long before her birth. The ride was becoming fuller than I had envisioned.

The neighborhood streets were the same on my ride as they were last fall; as were the stop signs; and the homes in which my neighbors live still sit on their same lots. One could argue that the only newness found on this ride of mine is the newly constructed house two blocks over and this spring season of renewal. But I think, while it was all the same, it was all different. Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, seems to be onto something when he observed that “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

The ”river” of my neighborhood has changed since last fall, as have I. But in so many ways, like the sun’s rise each morning over Massanutten Mountain, everything is the same, year in and year out, and day in and day out.  From such things, like a morning ride, come life’s delights.