Summer Fades Into Fall

     It felt like it yesterday, too.  Today will be more of the same, but by the weekend, we'll be unseasonably warm again.

     I intend to enjoy it.  I'm no fan of winter and if we get a little extra summer, that's okay.  I rode my bicycle to pick up a take-out supper last night and it was as fun as ever -- sure, it takes work, but hardly any.  Even an older, mid-price modern bicycle is miracle of lightness compared to the steel-framed one of my childhood.  I do still miss my late-70s Schwinn; it was rugged and dependable; but the bicycle I ride now weighs a fraction as much and carries more, thanks to front and rear baskets, gliding along like magic with multiple bags of groceries.

     It is a bit strange to ride home with nearly-silent electric buses gliding up to the center-lane stations, small roofed cyberpunk islands with displays showing the next arrivals, a modern grocery store on one side and buildings pushing a hundred years old on the other three corners.  From streetcars to Red Line electrobuses in a single long lifetime, from corner shops to slow decline and back from genteel Bohemianism to the present bustling businesses: it runs not in circles but a spiral, always coming back around but never to quite same place.