not a motorcycle mama
Mom’s been gone eight years now.
She died on August 17, 2016, six weeks before her eighty-eighth birthday.
My mother’s mother also died a little over a month before her eighty-eighth birthday, which is on Halloween. My grandmother was a Scorpio; she was also a nurse, a flirt and an excellent gardener.
My mother was the life of the party, a successful real estate agent from her early forties onward and an avid skier and golfer for most of her life. She loved pink. And babies. She was also feisty. If she weren’t already dead, me taking up motorcycle riding would surely have killed her.
Mom lived on a beautiful country road that rolled and twisted its way from a medium-sized town to a tiny village in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Yep. One of those roads. The kind you go back to again and again after you’ve ridden it once. Because it’s a great ride.
“Those darned motorcycles drive me crazy,” she would say when groups of bikers on (mostly) cruisers howled and growled their way up the hill at the top of which sat her big red brick house.
“They shouldn’t be allowed to make all that noise.” She would continue as she stomped from the front door to the kitchen, her loafered heels heavy on the wide pine floorboards. It was the same kind of stomp she used to wake my brother and I in our late teens when she reckoned noon was long enough to sleep in after a previous late night out.
Yes, it’s a mighty good thing it never even occurred to me to ride a motorcycle until after she’d been gone five years.
Despite all of this, I’ve marked Mom’s birthday, September 27th, with a solo loop since I started riding three seasons ago.
While she wouldn’t have approved of me riding a motorcycle, Mom would have enjoyed the birthday loop route I chose this year as well as the onset of the fall colours. She would have loved stopping at the Highlands Country Store and chatting with Colleen. She was a real people person.
And she would have been delighted by the theatrics and music of The Wizard is… Odd!? the musical that will be performed at the Almonte Old Town Hall from November 8 – 17 and for which I am the publicist (get your tickets here!). Mom adored singing, dancing and the stage.
I miss her every day. Probably will until I go too.
In the meantime, I will ride as long and as far as I can.
Here’s the loop:
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