learning to ride

It been a desire for every since I can remember.Cycling was what i wanted to learn.As i watched other kids ride their bikes I wondered how it would feel to be free,to balance on so thin a frame and to ride against the wind.But it was not to be.Overprotected and worried about everything we were forbidden to ride.Many years later as an act of rebellion I bought a scooter thanks to becoming an earning member of the family.I didn't know the first thing about balance and crashed many times to emerge stronger and more determined.Years later I graduated to a car,learning to drive at what most folks would imagine is a ripe old age(at least for learning motor skills).But the need to ride a cycle never left me.Lat week I sported a bike,small enough for my short feet to touch the ground and the determination came back.Much struggle later I was balanced and riding,the wind against my hair just as I had imagined it.The trill was everything,I had mastered it and the faces of the children on the road registered the shock that someone so old could be learning to do what they took so for granted.They watched me with great interest and then encouraged me along the road.Obviously they will never know what it feels like to want something so much and the great sense of achievement that comes from mastery.

Memories

There is much to write but the fingers on the key board refuse to move and the thoughts are trapped in the mind,probably because its not willing to be recorded.But it must at some point,that is the therapy.One full year to the day,the day I quit,the day a parent died and the day life changed in many ways.It brings the family together all three daughters,each meeting together for the first time in many years.Its a somber morning,we don't talk,we ponder,each captive in their own worlds,thoughts and memories.Each a different one,each in a different time frame.We meet again at the cemetery after a year.Ten roses of different hues adorn the grave but my father wasn't a lover of flowers so much.Perhaps if convention didn't exist,we may have left a good fresh fish and a bottle of black label.Would that have been more appropriate.I am not sure.We mourn out dead.My mother breaks her silence after a year and sobs,my eldest sister takes charge as always.I stand alone not physically but very much in my thoughts.I don't want to think,I don't want to remember,some memories are too painful,best to be wiped out but the human mind will not allow that and so we relive our most painful moments,every memory of that day by the hour etched firmly in my memory and this is the only way to deal with it,to remember.