• being here with you
• waking to the sound and smell of rain
• lunch with The Hubs
• taking my little ones on a field trip to the city library to sign up for the summer reading program
• riding my bike to school
• oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
• the last Thursday of the school year
• this cover of I Believe in a Thing Called Love by the Branches

It was such the perfect morning that just as Magnolia True and I were about to turn onto the street my school is on, I Believe in a Thing Called Love by The Darkness came up on my playlist.  If there’s a better song to ride to in the morning, I haven’t found it.  I push the pedals a little harder and may or may not play air guitar on my handlebars during the guitar solo.  I’m less embarrassed about that than I should be, especially since my school is in a suburban neighborhood and I pass scads of parents and students in their cars every morning.

The street my school is on is all downhill on my commute to work.  I love this because it means I arrive to work mostly unsweaty and on my way home I stomp the pedals all the way up the hill.

So there I was cruising downhill to school singing along.

“I believe in a thing called love.  Just listen to the rhythm of my heart.  I believe we can make it, love.  We’ll be rockin’ ’til the sun goes do-”

That’s when I saw it.

A turkey.

A giant, wild turkey strutting in a driveway to my right.  He was at least as tall as my bike wheels and he was all alone, which as you may have guessed isn’t a sign of a well-balanced turkey.

I believe I’ve mentioned my fear of birds before.  So upon seeing this terrifying bird, I let a string of profanity fly.  I’ll let you Mad Lib this one and insert your own avalanche of profanity on my behalf here:

___________________________________________________________

After I said a few choice words, I prayed the turkey wouldn’t see me because a 6 foot tall woman in a bright red shirt blasting The Darkness on a bicycle can be stealthy, right?

Right?

Wrong.

As I passed by the turkey, he looked right at me, a sinister look from the depths of Hades.

“I don’t want any trouble,” I told him as came to be even with driveway that was apparently HIS TERRITORY.

I was riding as far away from the driveway as I could without veering into oncoming traffic, which, in hindsight, may have been preferable to what was about to happen.

The turkey made a beeline for me.

I uttered some more choice words and kicked my pedaling into high gear.

I could hear the turkeys devil claws scrabbling on the asphalt behind me.

I looked back only once.

The bird was gaining on me.

I pedaled harder, sweat dripping down my face, and went into a tuck-which looks absolutely ridiculous on a cruiser bike.

I prayed that the turkey wouldn’t take flight because my bike helmet might stand up to those horrid talons, but surely my red t-shirt wouldn’t.

Did you know that red is known to incite fury in birds?  I didn’t find out that useful nugget of information until much later that day.

I ripped down the hill and careened into my school parking lot where I didn’t stop pedaling, not even across the playground, until I reached the safety of my classroom door.  My heart was playing a crazy game of Frogger in my chest and my hair, which wasn’t great to begin with, was now a sweaty, sopping mess.

To my great relief, I’d lost the turkey somewhere on the hill.  Of equal relief was that I had not peed my pants while he was in pursuit.  Small victories.

I haven’t seen the turkey since that day, but I did receive this card a few weeks later from one of my little ones.

The feathers are from a turkey she hunted with her dad.  Coincidence?  I think not.

Take that, turkey.  You’d better think twice before you mess with me.  I may be terrified of you, but I know a six-year-old little girl who isn’t.  Consider yourself warned.

Dragonflies make this final climb in the sheath of night, cloaked from predators when the dragonfly is in its most vulnerable state-when it cannot yet take flight, nor can it retreat back into the water.

We left school that day knowing that an adult dragonfly would likely be waiting for us the next morning.

When morning arrived and I pulled my bike up to my classroom door, I couldn’t help but laugh at the line of little ones who had their faces pressed up against our windows.  They were peering in, looking for our dragonfly and when I unlocked the door and let the little ones in, our outside windows were left with a row of fingerprint and nose smudges that made me giggle.

New dragonflies seek the light and we’d found all of our previous dragonflies patiently waiting in our windowsills.

We looked in the windowsills.

No dragonfly.

We looked in the habitat and, sure enough, attached to the willow branch was the ghostly exuvia, with a hole where the dragonfly had broken out of its skin.

Then we saw it.

The dragonfly was on its back beside the tank.  Two of its wings were fully formed.  Two of its wings were crumpled and stuck to the desk.

In the cover of night, something had gone terribly wrong.  The dragonfly had fallen from the willow branch before its wings were set and as the wings dried, they dried stuck to the desk.

“I think he’s dead, Mrs. McCauley,” one of my little ones said solemnly.

“Maybe.  Let me see.”  I put my finger to the dragonfly’s legs and he grabbed on, but his wings remained plastered to the desk.

It was at this moment that another one of my little ones entered the room.  She’s a gymnast, a high-flying daredevil of a kid who flips around the bars like walking is her second language and flying is her native tongue.

The gymnast broke her elbow when she took a fall in gymnastics class.  She wore a bright green cast on her arm.

She crowded around the dragonfly with us and when I explained what had happened she simply said, “He’s like me.  What are you going to do, Mrs. McCauley?”

I didn’t know.  I stood there for a minute watching the dragonfly struggle to free his wings from the desk.  I watched my little ones watching the dragonfly.

“You have to do something,” said the gymnast.

“I know.  I’m just trying to think of what.  I’ve never seen a dragonfly with injured wings like this, so I’m not quite sure how to help.  Let me think.”

“Shhhh, everybody, shhhh.  Mrs. McCauley has to think so she can save him,” a little boy said with his finger to his lips.  A hush fell over them and the pressure was on.

“Go get me a damp paper towel and I’m going to try re-wetting his wings.”  I sent one of my little ones to the sink and she hurried back with a soggy paper towel.

The dragonfly beat his two strong wings against me as I wet his crumpled wings, which began to release from the desk.

“It’s okay, little dragonfly, Mrs. McCauley isn’t going to hurt you.  She doesn’t even let us kill spiders,” a little boy said reassuringly.

I sponged the dragonfly off the desk and he crawled onto my finger, trying in vain to pump fluids into his crumpled wings.  The wings shivered, but remained deformed.

“We’d better keep him for a while and see if he can get his wings to straighten out.”  I slipped him into the wire cage we keep our new dragonflies in before we transfer them to the creek.

Later that morning we had another dragonfly emerge from its skin.

“My dad says that sometimes when animals are hurt or sick, putting them with a healthy animal helps them heal,” one of my little girls said.  ”Let’s put them together in the cage and see if that helps the wrinkled one.”

We put the pair of dragonflies together in the releasing cage.  The healthy dragonfly flitted and buzzed around while the other one sat watching.  We passed the cage around so each child could see what was happening.

“He looks sad,” many little ones lamented.

“What’s that word you were telling us about yesterday, Mrs. McCauley?” the gymnast asked.

“Which word?”

“The one about summer, how it’s sad that school is ending, but happy that summer is beginning.”

“Bittersweet.”

“I think the dragonfly is feeling bittersweet-happy that his friend can fly, but sad that he can’t yet.  Kinda like how I feel watching my friends play on the bars at recess.”

“That makes sense to me.”

We kept the pair of dragonflies in our classroom most of the day, but as the end of the day drew near we knew we had to release them or they would starve.

We hiked out to the creek with our pair of dragonflies.  A little boy gently stuck his finger under the dragonfly with fully formed wings.  He lifted his hand into the air and the dragonfly took flight, zipping to the creek.

The other dragonfly had yet to fly at all, not even flutter from one side of the cage to the other.

“Maybe if we hold him up in the air, he’ll fly,” another little boy suggested.  ”Maybe when he feels the air on his wings, he’ll know what to do.”

“It’s definitely worth a try,” I agreed.  The little boy lifted the dragonfly on his finger and into the air.

We waited.

I wish I could tell you that this story has a happy ending, that the dragonfly with crumpled wings took flight and soared into the sky.

It didn’t.

It was a Green Darner and we placed it on a green branch near the creek where we hoped it could camouflage from predators long enough to get its wings working.

On the day my little gymnast got her cast off, her dad offered to take her out for ice cream afterwards.  She asked if she could go to school instead because she didn’t want to miss a thing.  Her dad just shook his head and drove her to school, reminding her she can’t go on the bars just yet.  I have a feeling that the gymnast will be back to her high-flying ways in no time, but she’s right there’s bittersweetness in watching her friends flip on the bars while she sits on the sidelines and watches.

There’s a bittersweet feeling to the end of the school year.

As the year draws to a close, I think often of the crumpled dragonfly and of my little ones who I’m going to have to let go of so very soon.

Most of them are absolutely soaring.  Reading 100 words a minute, writing amazing stories, even tackling multiplication.

But a handful of my little ones came to me broken, with badly crumpled wings.  Each morning, they’d beat against me because letting anyone close when they were in such a vulnerable state was terrifying.

So often I didn’t know what to do, how to fix such acute breaks of the heart.  So often I found myself needing a moment to watch them and think of a new ways to try to help them.  For some it was enough and they eventually found their wings.

Others remain too scarred.  On the last day I’ll hug them a final time and hope that someday when they feel the air on their wings, they’ll find it within themselves to take flight.

This week I’m thankful for…

• playing Hide & Seek with my nephews
• riding my bike to work
• slow churned frozen vanilla custard
• Saturdays in my pajamas
• wearing my One Fish, Two Fish pajamas to school on Dr. Seuss Day.  Yes, I did ride my bike to school in my pajamas.
• riding my bike home under a double rainbow backed by gunmetal clouds
• arriving home on my bike just as it started to rain
• this present I received from a little one at my school:

How adorable is this bike basket/bag?  It gets even better…

TAGALONGS!!! There were Tagalongs inside!!! Surely I died and went to Heaven.

And look how my Sharpies look like a bright bouquet of happiness. Sigh. Perfection.

Filed under: Thankful Thursdays ]]> http://pedalsandpencils.com/2013/03/14/thankful-thursday-90-2/feed/ 3 stuckinmypedals Gratitude.pdf-1 How adorable is this bike basket/bag? http://pedalsandpencils.com/2013/02/21/thankful-thursday-91/ http://pedalsandpencils.com/2013/02/21/thankful-thursday-91/#comments Fri, 22 Feb 2013 05:58:30 +0000 stuckinmypedals http://pedalsandpencils.com/?p=6203 ]]>

This week I’m thankful for…

• giving my little ones new boxes of crayons for Valentine’s Day
• the little girl who was thrilled by the “new crayon smell” when she opened her Valentine
• three-day weekends
• shredded chicken tacos from the Crock Pot
• homemade ice cream topped with Magic Shell
• walking to the movie theater on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon
• lemons fresh from That Laura’s tree
• spending a day with my very first student teacher who is doing an amazing job in her own first grade classroom
• This VELO video from Motionlab.  Everything about it makes me happy.

This week I’m thankful for…

• driving with the top down in February
• clear, starry nights
• riding Magnolia True to school
• homemade ice cream
• my mom
• three-day weekends
• Girl Scout cookies.  I could write a love poem about Tagalongs.
• my Valentine
• sweet love notes from my little ones
• Cascade Bicycle Club’s Happy VELOtimes photo album

This week I’m thankful for…

• riding up the hill home in a higher gear than usual.  Magnolia True and I are having the best time.
• riding The Rocket during the Super Bowl.  We had a lovely time together riding on a practically empty trail
• Cheerios and bananas for breakfast
• a fresh haircut
• lunch with my mom
• the sound of rain on the roof
• days when the rain holds off until after recess
• my new bicycle scarf.  It’s ridiculously soft and perfect for cold morning bike rides to school.  Wow, your scarf jealousy is palpable.

• my new bicycle skirt.  Are you sitting down?  Your mind is about to be blown by this adorable skirt.  It’s breezy and thin, perfect for wearing with tights.

Image courtesy of sewcraftcreate.com

This week I’m thankful for…

• riding my bike to school
• mandarin oranges from the corner stand
• the sound of children playing at my neighborhood park
• grilled cheese and pickle sandwiches
• Heavy Metal Monday spin class
• the blooper reel of my nephew learning to ride his bike.  I love the videos of him riding successfully, but I love the faceplant videos just as much.  Okay, maybe more.
• the first rose on the rosebush by my front door
• floating bicycle photos by Zhao Huasen.  They are so delightfully whimsical.  Here’s my favorite.  It makes me giggle each time I look at it.  Click the photo below to see the entire collection.  They’re guaranteed to make you grin.

Here we are riding Pete’s first century in honor of our grandmother.  This is the only time on the ride I was ahead of Pete.

Photo courtesy of chrisflentye.com

Pete is five years my junior.  I remember reading bedtime stories to him.  I remember walking him to kindergarten.  I remember tickling and teasing him mercilessly, per Big Sister Code.  I also remember holding the back of his bike seat while he learned to ride a bike without training wheels.

Last Monday, Pete’s five-year-old son learned to ride his bike without training wheels.  Pete and his wife, Lisa, sent me videos and pictures all morning long of my nephew’s progress.  I was one proud auntie watching my teensy nephew pedal his brains out.

I watched those videos at least ten times that day.  Each time I was a sniffling, blubbering, crying mess.  I’m proud of my nephew and his first two-wheeled adventure, but the tears sprang up from the fierce pride I have in my brother for being the kind of dad who plays with his sons, the kind of dad who spends his days off teaching them to ride bikes.

In the last video Pete gave his son a push start, let him go and then jogged beside him as his son pedaled down the road.  There’s a moment when my nephew looks up at my brother to make sure he’s still there.  My brother tells him, “Keep goin’!  Keep goin’!”

Time is a brief and beautiful blossom and as I watched my brother and my nephew, I knew down deep in the chambers of my heart that my little brother will never be completely ready to let his son go.

In that moment I also knew that as my nephew grows into a man and faces the joys and hardships of life, he’ll always have his dad beside him encouraging him to keep going.

What a wonderful place this world would be if we all had someone to help us take our training wheels off, to hold us steady and then to propel us forward, covered in words of encouragement.

What a wonderful place the world would be if we all decided to be that person.

“Let’s all do it,” said Mr. Watts. “Close your eyes and silently recite your name.”
The sound of my name took me to a place deep inside my head. I already knew that words could take you into a new world, but I didn’t know that on the strength of one word spoken for my ears only I would find myself in a room that no one else knew about.

“Another thing,” Mr. Watts said. “No one in the history of your short lives has used the same voice as you with which to say your name. This is yours. Your special gift that no one can ever take from you.”
― Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

I’m tickled to announce that my new bike and I have chosen her name.  Thanks for all of your funny and lovely suggestions.  I’ve had a blast trying them on my bike.  Here are all the suggestions including some last minute additions from yesterday and today.

1. Sydney Bristow.  This one came from my husband who knows I loved the show Alias and that Jennifer Garner, who played super spy Sydney Bristow on Alias, also played the movie character Electra.  Electra is the brand of my new bike.  The Hubs is one clever guy.  The reason I didn’t choose this one is because had I named her Sydney Bristow, I would have felt pressure to always be saving the world whilst wearing awesome spy costumes.  Writing this, I realize I may have made a grievous mistake in NOT choosing that name.
2. Trudy. It just didn’t fit.
3. Sheila.  Another one that wasn’t right.
4. Pearl. This one was a favorite with many of you and also one of my favorites since the color of my bike is White Pearl.  What you may not know is that my car is named The Black Pearl, which has nothing to do with pirate ships and everything to do with the fact that her paint color is Black Pearl.  I call my car The Pearl for short, so if I’d named my new bike Pearl, it would have been WAY too confusing for this bear of little brain.
5. Rita. I once had a curmugeonly teacher named Rita.  I’m pretty sure she didn’t like kids, not even her own.  So that name never stood a chance.
6. Alice. This one reminded me of Alice from The Brady Bunch.  I spent many happy afternoons watching Alice and her hijinks with Brady kids.  However, I get called Alice ALL THE TIME because ‘Alicia’ is confounding to scads of people, so no dice for Alice.
7. Cloud 9.  If my bike had 9 gears instead of 8, this might have been her name.  It is a perfect bicycle name, but it just wasn’t right for my bike.  I hope some cyclist out there snatches this name up and gives it a good bicycle to claim.
8. Baby.  My sister suggested this one because of that line from Dirty Dancing.  You know the one.  ”Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”  Well, The Hubs insists that he puts Baby in a corner.  In fact, my Dirty Dancing DVD doesn’t live with the other DVDs.  It lives on the floor in a corner of the living room because every time I try to put it away, The Hubs puts it back in the corner, further proof that we are just masquerading as adults.  While I love this little game The Hubs and I play, last year I had a student who sang the chorus of Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ over and over and over and over and over and over EVERY SINGLE DAY.  It was the worst earworm ever and I couldn’t risk getting that song stuck in my head each time my bike and I had a conversation.
9. Chatty Cathy.  I liked the irony of this one being that my new bike has been quite tight-lipped and on the shy side.  In the end Chatty Cathy wasn’t the right fit.
10. Bianca.  My first ten speed was a Bianchi named Bianca.  So that name was already taken by a bike I loved.
11. Samantha.  This one came from my hilarious and obviously humble friend, Samantha.  Samantha is a smart, sassy redhead.  Samantha is the ideal name for a cherry red bike.
12. Bi-psyike-oh.  I refer back to being routinely beaten in Words With Friends.  I need a bike name I can spell within the first ten tries.  Is it bi?  Or by?  Psy?  Or psych?  Oh?  Or oe?  And shoot, where do those hyphens go again?  This name foretold an overworked delete key and a spelling induced tantrum.
13. Sally.  As in “Ride, Sally, ride.” according to my friend, Becky.  Sally is another good bike name, but when I tried it out on my bike, she didn’t answer to it.
14. Magnolia or Maggie for short.  My bike whispered this name in my friend Julie’s ear while Julie was reading.  Julie says, “Magnolias are beautiful as white as a blossom and yet strong and sturdy as a tree.”  Trees have special meanings for Julie and I so this suggestion made me tear up.  I loved every bit of this name from the get go.  I loved the meaning.  I loved the nickname.  I loved that my shy bike whispered it to my friend.  I was set to name her Magnolia until another friend suggested Truly.
15. Truly.  This suggestion and ridiculously cheerful video came from my dear friend, Jenna.  Truly is a fantastic bike name!  I loved it not only for the sugary Chitty Chitty Bang Bang song, but for the double meaning.  What my non-cycling friends might not know is that bike wheels have to be “trued”, meaning made to ride straight and without wavering.  How’s that for a reminder on how to live life?  The other reason I fell in love with this name is because my own name means “filled with the truth.”

So there I was stuck between Magnolia and Truly.

I tried out both names on my bike and wouldn’t you know it, she told me liked them each just as much as I did.  Though we’d narrowed it down to two, we had our work cut out for us.

On our ride to school this morning, I tried out Magnolia Truly.  Then Truly Magnolia.  Then Maggie Truly.  Then Truly Maggie.  None of them were quite right.  Not quite yet.

As we cruised down the hill with the chill of morning, flushing our cheeks I said, “You’re a great bike, Magnolia True.”

That was it.

A beautiful name for my beautiful bike.

Magnolia True.

I smile every time I say it.

Thanks for all of your suggestions.  I hope you’ll get a chance to meet Magnolia True in person someday soon.  When you do, she says you can call her Maggie True for short.

Magnolia Stellata by Jens Luedicke. Image courtesy of fotopedia.com.