Rain, sun, wind, simultaneously: a wild day for a community cycle in Galway. I dusted off my little gold top hat and took out my new bike for the spin, a Royal Dutch Gazelle I bought secondhand from Freddy, a Dutch girl who had returned to Holland after finishing a psychology PhD at the University of Limerick. At first I thought I'd just swoop into the city and plop the cash into the intermediary's hand and get home before dinner, but I missed the mid-morning train. So I caught the bus, to sit behind two women with raspy voices, as a smoky miasma throbbed in my nostrils. Pollen, too, I thought as the bus flew past buttercup-yellow fields. In Limerick, I waited in charity shops, the city art gallery, and People's Park, where I ate an ice cream sandwich on the dais of a freestanding limestone column dedicated to a Protestant MP from the years before the Free State, as silver leaves and rose scent eddied with the wind. Before I met the nice beardy giant from Athlone named Richie, before our chat about the differences between Galway and Limerick over tea and sliced pineapple, before I tested the bike and felt its sturdiness and rightness for me, I enjoyed my time on the edge of boredom, the freedom from screens and even books, the rare sense of being where I didn't have to know where I was, just to smell and to taste and to see what is immediate.

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