Minnesota motorcycle season started shockingly early in 2012. So after a couple years of borrowing or renting motorcycles for the occasional day trip with my Boomer biker parents, Nathan and I decided that 2012 was the year to buy one for ourselves. In March – yes, March! – on a sunny, warm spring day, we brought home a 2002 Yamaha Virago 250. Black, shiny, classic.

And we rode. Friday night dates, weekend rambles, and one four-day getaway to the North Shore, just the two of us, the road, the green earth, the wide living sky, the water and the trees, the friendly towns and quaint cafes.

There are many drug-free ways to free the mind, to unwind the soul and dip in a refreshing stream of ideas and impressions. But I have found nothing that compares to riding on the back of a motorcycle behind my best beloved, my denim-clad knees cutting into the clean wind, my booted feet resting solidly on the pegs. Riding with Nathan is a delightful blend of solitude and togetherness.

This year, we followed a dream that led us west, away from free and easy childcare (namely, our parents), towards climbing mountain roads – and therefore, away from child-free rides on a low-powered motorcycle, towards Nathan riding solo or with one of the kids on the bigger dual-purpose bike he recently bought.

So this week we pulled the Virago out of the garage to take some photos and make a Craigslist ad. Together we shined it up with soft cloths, and I said I felt sad. But as we talked and remembered that we had only bought the bike last year, I was comforted to realize how well we spent that time. We packed a lot of memories into that riding season, and I know we won’t sell them with the motorcycle.

In the future, only a few years from now when the kids are a little older, the two of us will probably ride regularly together again. And then, if we are still living in Colorado, our Friday night rides will be more majestic and adventurous than back roads through farm fields and prairie.

But whatever the future holds, farewell to the Virago means farewell to a chapter in our lives. A profoundly good and well-lived chapter, one I will read again from time to time in my memories, the photos we took, even the songs and poems I wrote in that larger-than-life, incredibly long Minnesota motorcycling season of 2012.

I posted a rough recording of one of those songs here. And below, a poem. (Instructional moment for non-bikers: in rude and sexist biker lingo, riding on the back of a motorcycle is called “riding bitch.”)

Riding Bitch, Refined

7/12/12 Julia Tindall Bloom

Viewed from the back of a bike

The world is poetry

Cows are bovine mother figures

The road is a ribbon

Every sparrow is joy embodied.

The retiree on his riding lawnmower

Is turning over Keats or Kerouac in his fertile mind

And the biker with whom we just traded the low sign

Is rolling through The Moldau in his memory

Because nothing else would do

As a soundtrack for this movie.

Note: I think I always associate Bedrich Smetana’s The Moldau with the road (even though it’s about a river) because my dad played it in our car’s cassette player when I was young and we were traveling. Here’s a link.