schenectady (noun) - a city in northeast New York, from the Iroquois "Schau-naugh-ta-da", meaning, the place beyond the pines; also, that time we lived in the sloping mountians and my heart finally said, "this is a home, too".

From this:

 And this:

To this:

 

And this.

And this.

And all of these, 

             and then some.

From one of the hardest, rockiest seasons of my life to this rich, dancing, golden one.

In two years.

The faithfulness of God truly amazes me.

Looking back over the past two years, I feel guilty that I wasn’t happier. On the surface, it should have been easy: we were newlyweds, just starting out on life together! It should have been an adventure. 

It shouldn’t have been so hard to find a people, and a place, to belong, because we were together.

I shouldn’t have been crying every day.
 

 Right?




But we sure did learn fast how much we needed one another. How to build each other up, to
make each other more than we’d been before, and more than we could ever be by ourselves.

And, well, I don’t want to say that people experience bad things so that they can better appreciate the good things, because that seems shallow and overused and not at all comforting.

But usually, the most cliché things are the most true.

And how incredible it is to have joy come so easily again!

My heart is so full, so achingly thankful, for all that I have grown to love in the past two years- and “grown” really is the only word for it- that I want to laugh and cry all at the same time.

Bit by bit, this place and these people have wrapped strong cords around my heart that tie
a piece of me here, to New York. They’re just like the ones that bind me to Michigan, and to
Wisconsin, and I’ve grown enough now to recognize what they are.

Ties of home.

And I am so, so thankful that God has given me the gift of this place, at this time, as home.

Schenectady

It is a difficult thing,
to start over.
to hollow out the ending enough
to leave room for another beginning.

there is nothing , at first:
an empty space,
the corner of a room just emptied.
the first place the patient spiders come to
and the last place they leave.

You must clear away the cobwebs
the old musts,
and let them to spin new strands
clear ones that will not choke on sunlight

They will cut you
those webs
when you tear them loose again
when you start over and over and over

but it will be your prayer
your amen
your privilege to string around your heart
and hollow out the ending-
a gift for the next beginning.



 

angel (noun) –a heavenly figure, usually depicted with white robes and wings, but sometimes represented as a greasy bike mechanic.

I don’t know if angels walk around on earth and interact with human beings. But if they do, I wouldn’t expect to find them in Nowhere, NY, in a battered bike shop with wide, uneven floorboards, somewhere up in the high peaks of the Adirondacks. I wouldn’t have pictured them with long, grey-streaked brown hair and well-worn Chacos. And I wouldn’t expect them to be potheads.

But if I were to run into a member of the heavenly host, out on a jaunt around the planet, I would expect to like him immediately. If his teeth were crooked, they’d be set in a wide, warm smile that’d make me want to smile back just as big. If his stomach stuck out a little far, it would be because of a few too many beers with good friends. And he’d be one of the most easygoing, welcoming individuals I could imagine- kind of like Jesus.

And if this is what angels are like when they visit earth, then I’m pretty sure Eric and I ran into one.

We never would have if Eric hadn’t forgotten to replace the cassette on his bike when he replaced his old stretched chain. The day after he put the new chain on, we drove north to those piled-up, blue-green Adirondacks I’ve come to love so much, and it wasn’t until we were there for the weekend that we realized the cassette was as worn down as the chain had been.

If you’re not familiar with this bike lingo (like I wasn’t until this happened) it basically means the gears in back and the links on the chain are so worn, they don’t catch and when you pedal, so it skips. As you might imagine, it’s pretty much impossible to ride any sort of technical trail if this is happening.

We left the campground and drove until we had reception, then started calling bike shops. Most were closed already for Memorial Day weekend, and we were close to giving up on a chance to ride at all when a cheery voice on the other end said, in answer to Eric’s query about hours, “Yeah, I can be open till one, maybe two tomorrow afternoon? Come on by!”

So we did. The next day, we drove over and around and down one of the loveliest roads I’ve ever been on. It set us winding through cliffs and hills, crossing and re-crossing the Ausable River, and gliding along under the high-domed blue sky, and forty-five minutes later it brought us to a town (so small you could hardly call it even that). 

The ramshackle side street  we turned down next was lined with overgrown lilacs that reached knobby branches across shabby homes, dressing them in scattered clouds of purple.It was here that we stopped, across the street from a flat-faced building with a man sitting out front. The bike rack to his left might have toppled if you leaned on it too hard, but the bikes stuck in it were anything but rickety: under the mud, they gleamed, their lines hard and powerful. And then-

“You’re just in time!” the man said, setting his mug down on the cable spool that served as his patio table. He was already eyeballing Eric’s bike.

“In time for what?” Eric asked.

“I just finished my coffee!” He’d crossed the road by then, and when he reached us he stuck out a hand, his smile wide and honest. We shook, and then he took the bike from Eric, who’d just hefted it off the rack, and started examining it; spinning the wheels, testing the shocks, and all the while asking us questions: where were we from? What trails in the area were we planning on riding? Had we eaten at the sandwich shop up the road? Because if we hadn’t yet, we should: they had the world’s best sandwiches!

I think he would have done the entire job right there in the middle of the street if a car hadn’t come up just then. The driver slowed to let us move out of the way, waving amiably, and the owner of the bike shop waved back. And then we followed the man into his shop.

It was unlike any bike shop I had ever been inside before. The bikes that crouched in rows in the small room were old, not new, although there were a few beefy downhill frames stacked on a couch, and some light, speedy-looking road bikes hung on the walls. Boxes of tire tubes sat in rows on the low rafters, and behind the counter (which only had glass on one side) hung a wooden sign, words burned clumsily onto its surface:

“The man who works with his hands is a laborer.
The man who works with his hands and his mind is a craftsman.
The man who works with his hands, his mind, and his heart is an artist.”

I smiled when I saw that. And I smiled again when the man told us a bit of his story: how he used to be an engineer, but quit because he wanted to work with his hands, to give his time to the thing he loved. He laughed out loud when he remembered us from two years ago, when he and some buddies had been breaking in a trail while Eric and I—out for my first-ever mountain bike ride—accidentally  ended up on that difficult run. And then we laughed with him when he told us his life philosophy: 

“Everybody opts for the quick fix now, you know? I call it ‘FPP’: flip a switch, push a button, pop a pill... ain’t that easy? People don’t take ownership… it’s rough, man. You forget what’s really important.”

And somehow, between his stories and ours, two hours passed. Although he only charged us for the cost and installation of the part we needed, he gave the bike a full tune-up, explaining what he was doing step-by-step, and stopping to clear things up if either of us had a question. And then, as we were about to leave, he stopped us.

“Have you guys ever done ‘Poor Man’s Downhill’?” he asked.

We told him no, we’re from Schenectady, so we don’t get up this way much.

“Oh, man, you need to ride it. It’s not hard, but it’s a ton of fun to rip down! Tell you what,” he said, shaking a strong, battered finger at us. “A bunch of us are doing some shuttles up to the trailhead tomorrow: there’ll be food, and beer… you should come!”

We told him we’d love too, and that even though we had a long drive home tomorrow, we’d try to be there.

Fast-forward to the next afternoon.

We pulled up to the meeting spot a little before the bike shop owner had said to be there, so we got to watch everybody else arrive. It was a group of mostly guys, many of them in need of a shave and/or a haircut. They started pulling bikes off of racks and out of truck beds and tipping them down on the grass: big, beefy downhill bikes that made me suddenly very self-conscious of my little hardtail.

("Hardtail" is slang for a bike without full suspension. 
Just in case you wanted to know.)

Despite the cussing that filled up at least half of each sentence any one of them spoke, they seemed like a nice bunch, and they welcomed us without question. Some of them even recognized us from two years ago, as the bike shop owner had, so any doubts I had about Eric and I getting into a car full of strangers fell away. And that sense of security lasted until we got into our “shuttle”.

I had never seen such a beater minivan until we wheeled our bikes up to what was to be our transportation to the trailhead. It was the furthest thing from a “mom car” you could imagine: rusty, dirty, missing all but the front seats. It took a bit of creative packing, but soon we had five bikes and five riders tucked in, and our caravan of trucks and vans turned out onto the toll road up the mountain.

And this is where it gets really good.

 
See, we were barely on the road when the driver plopped a six pack down on the center console, popped the top off one of them, and started pounding it down. Several of the others in our van grabbed one for themselves, and my eyes got wide.

(Yes, "Porkslap" is the name of the
beer they were drinking....)

Personally, I wouldn’t drink a beer before barreling down a crazy downhill trail… but then again, I hadn’t been on this trail before: maybe they were just so familiar with it that they weren’t nervous like me.  

I decided that it would be best for me to ignore the fact that our driver had finished his before we were even halfway to the trailhead. But my eyes got pretty wide when one of the guys in the back asked if anybody “partook of any medicinals” and pulled out a little plastic container.

To my great relief, they opted to wait for a clearing halfway down the trail to pass the pipe around (and lest you think me a prude, the random drug tests where Eric and I work are pretty serious business). I’ll just say that our newfound friends were a pretty loose, relaxed group when they went flying down the side of the mountain, jumping rocks and skidding turns like nobody’s business. I didn’t even try to keep up: they were a good challenge for my fearless husband, maybe, but I wanted to make it down the mountain without eating too much mud.

And I did. And we even went up again for a second run. For Eric and I, that meant another chance to test our skills on the intense trail; for the rest, it meant more Porkslap and pot. By the time we finished that second run, though, there were pink tints in the sky, and the blue shadows stretching across the clearings were a reminder of the three-hour drive we had between us and home. So we waved goodbye to our new hippie friends and headed towards the car.

“Great to hang with you guys!” the owner of the bike shop called after us. He left the group and came trotting up to us, holding out his hand and grinning his big, easy smile. “Next time you’re around, stop in and say hi! Even if you don’t need a bike fixed.”

 

Which is why I think that man is an angel in disguise.

We left the Adirondacks in a hazy, yellow-red sunset, rolling back towards Schenectady and the routine of our people and places there, and we left with a smile and a story. The bike shop owner was part of our lives for less than a day, but I’ll remember him better than some of the people I interact with much more regularly.

I know what you’re thinking… and I can’t say you’re wrong in thinking that. You can tell me that it was the “medicinals” making him so easygoing and kind, or the beer, and you might be right. But I like to think that it’s just him: that his big, crooked smile and joy-crinkled eyes are all his own.

He lives his life with his hands, his mind, and his heart, and because of that, his life becomes a gift to others... even total strangers.