Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The Gravel Road

Funny, I just launched three fiction books in The Narrow Road Series and only yesterday, I found myself driving along a freshly gravelled road, sitting on my 1984 Yamaha motorcycle. The bike is as old as my son Kyle. I originally bought the bike to help out a friend. My husband Danny is known to have been an extreme bike-rider in his day, having survived seventeen motorcycle accidents. The thought makes me cringe.

Danny took the old bike apart piece by piece and then proceeded to put it back together again making it as good as new. After all his hard work, I had no choice but to join the Rider Training Institute Course and get my licence. I turned fifty and passed the test. Did I have a moment of insanity? After my little dirt road experience yesterday, I am questioning myself while sitting here feeling more like a seventy year old who was hit by a truck. What I really hit and slid along, was every stone on that little country road. Lesson learned, don't hit the brakes on a gravel road. Out went the bike from under me and quickly I found the skin ripping from my flesh until the bike came to a stop. My question, who put that truck on the railroad track at that exact moment when I was approaching? The timing couldn't have been more perfect. As I approached the railway track, there no warning or flashing lights, just this truck on railway wheels that suddenly appeared, crossing the track in front of me. It was either go splat like a bug on a windshield and hit the truck or hit the dirt road. So I did the slide into third base. Not exactly planned, but more my instinctual reaction of survival.

Danny stopped his bike and walked back to my rescue and picked up my broken bike while I spit the dirt out of my mouth and picked the little stones from my flesh. I had to get back on the broken motorcycle and drive it the rest of the way home. Thank the Lord that I could do that. However, today my aching body is feeling the side affects. What is the lesson in it? Sometimes in life, we have to pick ourselves up and get back on that bike or simply put, sometimes we have to get back up.
In life we get many surprises as we travel the roads of life. I guess it is part of the learning experience. I'm still thinking that there must be a less painful way of learning these life lessons.