On the Randon forum, someone asked if anyone had received a 2009 Super Randonneur medal yet.  He thought he’d heard they would ship in November.  Nick, the fellow in charge of shipping them, replied that he’d like to ship them but they haven’t come in from France yet.  He said that shipping them before they arrive might lead to some sort of time paradox.

    The morning after I read that, I woke up, swung my legs over the edge of the bed, pulled my socks over the cuffs of my long underwear, looked at the closed blinds, and thought, “I’d like a paradox this morning.  I’d like to open that blind and see the yard and the hills beyond all dressed in warm, June green on this cold December morning.”

    Bones!  No paradox for me.  The calendar next to me says winter starts on Saturday, but I’ve never heard of winter starting on the 26th.  I think our solar winter began last Monday, but the weather got ahead of the season.  

    If you live on the East Coast, north of North Carolina, you got your winter last weekend, in spades.  Here in Randolph County, we got some snow that turned to freezing rain late Friday, and Saturday was plumb ugly, but Sunday was clear and cold, and on Monday, the first day of winter, I rode my bicycle to the bank and hardware store in Randleman.

    Tuesday, I made the thirty mile round trip to Liberty and back.  In Liberty, I almost experienced one of those time paradoxes.  I stood in two lines, one at the post office and one at the drug store, and the longer I stood in line, the longer I had to wait.  Every time the clerk said to the lady several places ahead of me, “Well, thank you,”  she said, “And, I need . . .”

    They say it’s good to slow down and smell the roses, but everyone was coughing and I wanted out.  Dr. Johnson said, “Patience is a virtue easily fatigued by exercise.”  

    Today, I snuck out for a quick twenty miles and saw another rider ahead of me.  I went after him, and I think I was catching up, but not very quickly, if at all, and then I came to Old Liberty Road and he went straight while I went right so I could come home and get back to work.  You don’t see a lot of bicycle riders in Randolph County so it was fun to see one out during the first week of winter.

    Really, it’s not so bad around here most of the winter.  At least compared to Cleveland, it’s not.  I lived in Cleveland for six years when I was a kid and I don’t want to do that again -- live in Cleveland or be a kid.  The trick is, go out and ride.  It’s usually not nearly as bad as I think it’s going to be, but, then again, sometimes it’s worse than I could have imagined.  Anyway, there’s nothing to do about it.  I hope that someday I will pull that blind up and it will look like the photo at the top again.  Even if it isn’t a time paradox and it really is June again, I hope it happens.  In December, I start to doubt it will ever be warm again.  We’ve still got all of January and at least most of February before we can realistically hope for the thermometer to start creeping up.

    In the meantime, I’ll ride in the cold, as will most of the rest of you, and I’ll groan every time I run the wheelbarrow back to Daddy’s Shed and pull more firewood out of what was so recently a very comforting stash.

    At least we have our bicycles and that’s a lot more than people used to hope for.  Think of all the poor souls who lived before the late 19th century.  They had winter without bicycles.

    Merry Christmas!