The economy caught me this week. It grabbed hold when I wasn’t looking, a mid-day phone call yanking my feet from under me.
“We are not renewing your contract next quarter,” I was told.
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A quail calls somewhere to our left, likely from a fence row that draws a line between a burgeoning soybean field and rolling acres still standing in corn stubble. His name is Bob White, and he lifts his voice to tell the world of his existence. To speak of living. To acknowledge the day.
It is mid-June, but it feels like summer for the first time this year. Heat and humidity wrap around us like a jacket. The garment we gladly wear.
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The person on the phone says he’s sorry, calling the layoff a “furlough,” saying he hopes things will pick up again, that I will be called back. But not this year, we both know. And, very likely, never.
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We move on. Past fields and birds. Into summer. We’ve ridden so long to get here that we don’t want to stop. We need to feel the warm breeze, to coast on the downhills without a shiver, to breathe deep the mown lawns, dusty fields and the tangle of weeds fighting for space in the ditch.
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“Breathe deep the gathering gloom,” wrote Graeme Edge in Days of Future Passed, made popular by The Moody Blues in 1967. It takes an instant to breath again after I hang up the phone. Things suddenly got more complicated. It’s more than the lost income. It’s also the realization that my work isn’t essential. My world didn’t just get smaller, so did I.
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“We just move on,” says Liz later that evening. Always the responsible one. Not the type to live in the past, whether that space holds good times or ghosts.
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We move on. Deeper into June a pedal stroke at a time. Past the quail and the crops. Over hills on smooth blacktop and up the long, daunting climb in the back of our minds. We don’t speak about the day, about the phone call, about the future. Not now. This is our time of escape. We hear Mr. White calling to us, and we roll on.
Late in the ride we come to a road freshly paved, the tar and chipped stones causing us to detour our route. But we make it home safely, finding another way.
22.85 miles — Henry and Hancock counties
