Grain of Sand

 This piece was originally written in April 2022.  My wife and I finally made it to Romania for Orthodox Easter for the first time since Europe ground to a Covid ridden standstill March 2020. She hails from the North-Eastern corner of the country, the region of Moldova and grew up just after the fall of communism, first with her grandparents in the agricultural South of the region, then moved north at the age of six to live with her parents in the city of Iași, who were by that point were teaching at the University. Easter is without exception celebrated by the family in the South at the grandparent’s rural village of Vânători (hunters), with the matriarch, Mamaia, coordinating proceedings the throughout the weekend. This includes preparing the vegan for the fasting period before, preparing the homegrown chickens for the Sunday feast, baking the Cozonac (traditional Romanian marble loaf), getting the family to the local church before midnight, and preparing the candles to pla...

It's quite a bizarre sensation to read back through one's 'coming of age' blog posts. This stormy October evening I spun up blogspot and felt like I had opened the padlock to my old diary, my quite vanilla 'Catcher in the Rye' years, adapted to cyclists. While I don't consider myself a particularly public person, I was amazed by the consistent documentation of my thoughts and feelings through the major parts of my life at the time; 71 articles between July 2008 and June 2011 no less. Damn I was a disciplined teenager. I can't recollect when, but I made this blog and the partner bike-fit blog private at some point after 2012, presumably out of potential embarrassment of being a complete and utter saddo at University. In hindsight I can see the chances of an interested girl deciding that the blog was the final straw, after she had suffered through chat about aerospace engineering and cycling, was slim. Maybe I had been embarrassed about the lack of mention...