Before, After, Bicycles and Blossoms

My uncle Bobby took this pic last summer when he came to visit. I had just purchased the place and this is what it looked like before I had time and energy to do anything except take down the Groovin Beans sign and hang my own coffee flag.

This is what it looks like as of yesterday, after new posts were put in, garden beds cut and mulched and the beautiful azaleas that Kalinas gave me for my birthday (that he planted, too!) AND
the sign was hung!!!

SO................here's the post I wrote last night..........

I now have Thursdays off. The real McCoy has taken over my closing shift and I decided before she even took it over that I’d spend the first month or two coming in anyway and just get stuff done around the place that I never can get to doing when I’m behind the counter drawing shots, etc.

I went in this morning bright and early because my sign friends who have been diligently creating this freaking masterpiece for months promised and swore that Thursday, yes we promise Thursday, they would be bringing the sign to hang.

I woke up like a kid on Christmas. Well, actually, that’s a lie. I actually took Ella to school twenty minutes late because neither of us could get out of bed this morning. We went in to Burlington last night, the two of us and did a weeeee bit of shopping and sushi eating and had a later night than usual. So yeah, twenty minutes late to school but then I was there, by 8:30, yerba mate in hand and waiting anxiously for the call to tell me when I could expect them.

I cracked open the laptop while I waited, entered and paid some bills, replied to some emails and helped Holly when the line got long at the counter.

They called at 9:30 to tell me they’d be there within the hour so I rode my bike down the street to give fair warning to Bill and his boys, whose muscles we’d need for the monstrosity beauty of a sign that was on it’s way.

Matt showed up with the sign in his truck, I texted the boys and they arrived in the pickup with a couple of ladders .

After the thing was lifted and secured I realized that thirteen people had already congregated in front of the shop….. It was like a ground breaking ceremony. The traffic through town was periodically backed up due to the construction on the bridge at the end of town so all the cars were getting ample exposure to this new sign. Perfecto.

It was interesting to see who came in and gushed over the sign and who came in without having noticed it all.

After an hour or two of just walking back and forth from the bar, drinking too much iced coffee and then returning to the front porch so that I could just stare at it some more…. Oh, and getting my insurance agent down to the place to take pics of it so that I could put it IMMEDIATELY on the policy……I finally decided that I was being really idle, which is really so foreign these days, and so I put on my new, funny looking padded spandex pants underneath the cargo shorts, donned the new helmet and Camelback and set out for a bike. I had an hour and a half to ride and had no idea where I was headed, other than west on Route 15. Two minutes into the ride, I remembered Kalinas complaining of the serious headwinds the other day… realized that I was bike riding through a funnel……….and after three or four miles turned off Route 15 onto the Long Trail. I knew that this little extension of the trail led to the new suspension bridge that was recently built over the northern branch of the Lamoille River off of Hogback Road and that it could loop me right back toward Johnson………..with the wind at my back.

It’s been years since I actually mountain biked on a mountain and I spent the whole time teetering between dreamily noticing the plant life and wondering how the hell people really enjoy this stuff. I saw my first bluets and violets. My first trout lilies and trillium. I saw fiddle heads and fiddle heads halfway through their unfolding… that sweet embryonic beginning of a fern.

My thighs ached riding uphill and I remembered that my tires had recently been changed over to cater more to road biking. I had to walk up the serious hills for lack of any real traction. I rode downhill, aiming that front tire like a samurai in between rocks and over small fallen saplings. I kept my fingers around the brakes.

I went up a small mountain and came back down. Calling it a mountain is even a bit of an overstatement. Had I been walking or driving, I might not have even noticed the lips and hips of the landscape. But I came to a cliff and looked around, wondering what the hell had happened and where the suspension bridge might be. I saw it over yonder and realized that at my feet was an extension ladder supported by a serious metal cord tied around the base of a tree. I guess the creators and maintainers of the Long Trail expected hikers to slip the ladder over the edge of the cliff and crawl down, cross the stream and hike up to the bridge for crossing…and had I been on foot that’d be fine but I didn’t trust myself to crawl down that ladder with a bike slung over my shoulder so I wandered around the cliff till I found a semi safe place to crawl down.

Every spring I try to beat my record for the first swim of the season. The last date I could remember is June first and I haven’t been able to beat it the past few years because we’ve consistently been away on vacation that week preceeding. When I finally crossed that stream today, I ended up with both sneakers submerged in the water and thought, hhhhmmmm, that’s quite pleasant, especially considering all the scratches and bangs my shins had earned on the trail. It felt so good, in fact, that I decided to one up my record and do the first swim on this eighth day of May. It was a quick naked plunge and I thought my lungs might collapse and now I have no freaking idea how I could possibly beat this new record…..but it’s done and the ride with the wind at my back was all the more pleasant for it. And I now do know why people enjoy this stuff. I can see how it gets addictive.

I got back to the shop, drove to pick up Bean and while she enhanced her math skills with her tutor, I hogged out the last knarly spot of the shop to prep it for painting and then organized some old forgotten corners.

And I stopped occasionally to look at my new sign.

Purdy, aint it?