Flashes of Panic

If I’d ever made a list of things I never expected to do (and, I’ll admit, it would’ve been quite a long list,) I might have put washing my feet with Fast Orange on the list.

Fast Orange is a pumice-based industrial hand cleanser, not entirely unlike a liquid scouring pad for skin, and I was working my feet because I had been riding my bike in sandals. The street perpendicular to ours has been intermittently ripped up and patched for weeks, and today they put what we hope is the last coat of patch on the road (though I expect the street to be poor driving for a few years.) The edges of the patch were “sealed” with exceptionally sticky, gummy tar, and my bike tires picked up bits of it and flung them around as I rode down the road. One or two wedged between my sandals and my feet.

I wonder how messy it would have been if I hadn’t had mudflaps on the bike.

Now Playing: I’ll Meet You In The Sky from Live From Northampton by The Nields

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