{"id":573899140,"date":"2026-06-22T20:29:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T00:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573899140"},"modified":"2026-07-22T03:44:41","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T07:44:41","slug":"the-memory-the-bike-the-bush-the-lightning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2026\/06\/22\/the-memory-the-bike-the-bush-the-lightning\/","title":{"rendered":"The memory, the bike, the bush, the lightning"},"content":{"rendered":"

We celebrated 17 years of marriage this weekend. I put on the same shirt I wear every year. Her mother gifted it to me years ago. It’s the shirt I was wearing when we got engaged. It was the shirt I wore the night I took this photo, the night before our wedding. <\/p>\n

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We hired a friend who is a photographer to shoot the big day, and she did a great job with our engagement photos, in a nor’easter, and on our wedding day, just about the hottest place in the country on the hottest weekend of the year. There is no such thing as summer wool. <\/p>\n

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I made reservations at a local farm-to-table sort of place. There were two whole tables occupied, and by the end of the evening we pretty much had the place to ourselves. It was a nice, quiet dinner to mark the passage of time. Too much time. And not enough. All of it moving so fast. None of it slowing down, which would be the polite thing for time to do.<\/p>\n

Seventeen years is really 21. I’ve been counting the days, each one a blessing, but ya know, maybe I should have been counting the laughs and the memories, both of which mean more with every passing … day. <\/p>\n

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Got back on the bike this weekend. It’s only been, I dunno, a month, which explains a lot. But I had a perfect afternoon for it. The water was low, the clouds high, the breeze in my face, and so on. <\/p>\n

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It’s good to see that the local farming has continued neatly since I’ve been out this way. Whoever is working this field hasn’t been working in my yard!<\/p>\n

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Which would be a silly thing to do, but a thing I would appreciate. <\/p>\n

Today we went out for a ride together and I get well and thoroughly dropped. The nice thing about it was that this was an out-and-back route, so when she turned around, because she was ahead of me, and came back the other direction it didn’t seem like I was that far behind after all. <\/p>\n

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But after I turned around, chased back on, caught up, and got dropped again, I was Dropped. And then the clouds rolled in. At least they were in front of me, which means I could monitor my progress, or judge when I was going to get wet. <\/p>\n

It was a race, of course. Sometimes you’re determined to win, and sometimes you’re defeated by meteorology. <\/p>\n

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But, sometimes, it is a draw. I was standing in the driveway, putting things away, when it started to rain.<\/p>\n

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We have an oversized bush by the garage, and it’ll get trimmed back soon, but the wind and the weight of the rain showed that some of them needed to be cut back sooner. They were in the way of progress, or parking the car. So I grabbed the old hedge shears, and that’s when the lightning and thunder moved in.<\/p>\n

I only needed to cut two branches, no, that one, too. Three branches. I only needed to cut three branches. Lightning, rumbling, rolling in from the north. This is how I stayed safe. I waited in between lightning bolts. Then I leaned out, one foot in the drive, one foot in the garage, snip, and then duck back in the garage. Three times, thinking, with a grin, Out here, on the edge of the driveway, si where I’ll do something foolish and hurt myself one day.<\/em><\/p>\n

But not today. Or tomorrow. I’ll find something to do on the other side of the house tomorrow. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We celebrated 17 years of marriage this weekend. I put on the same shirt I wear every year. Her mother gifted it to me years ago. It’s the shirt I was wearing when we got engaged. It was the shirt I wore the night I took this photo, the night before our wedding. We hired […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,40,6,3,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573899140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures","category-cycling","category-memories","category-monday","category-photo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573899140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573899140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573899140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573899141,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573899140\/revisions\/573899141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573899140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573899140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573899140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}