“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mom?” Rick said as he got ready to leave after the funeral.
“You can go on a bike ride with me sometime.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be back in two weeks.”
Two weeks later, Rick returned.
“Are you ready for that bike ride, Mom?”
“Absolutely,” she said with a smile.
His father had mounted a bike rack on the roof of his car. Rick struggled to get the big bike up there. He wondered how his father had done it.
Riding along a trail with his mother behind him, Rick remembered his father taking him for bike rides and hikes through these woods when he was a kid. Rick had loved the woods. But he hadn’t spent time in nature in many years. He was always working.
He remembered his father talking reverently about nature.
“It soothes your soul,” he used to say.
But as soon as Rick moved away, he got busy. On the weekends, when he might have taken his own children on bike rides or hikes, he usually kicked back and watched TV.
He had lost touch with the Earth. Now the sights and smells and sounds of the woods were all around him, and he felt something deep inside himself he’d forgotten even existed.
Rick thought of his father. He could almost hear his voice when his mother said, “Isn’t it beautiful, Richard?”
“Yeah, Mom, it is.”