Oak.
Maple.
Beech.
Oak.
Going uphill, head down, I see every leaf. I'm pedaling through the back of Druid Hill Park, on the gloriously hilly closed roads along the east face overlooking (through the trees, that is) the Jones Falls Expressway, the Falls themeselves, the old mills along the falls. The road is closed, the leaves are thick on the road and wet, the traction is iffy, the hills are steep.

Oak
Oak
Maple

I see every ridge, every vein, every fold of each leaf as I ride over them, upward. Then I crest a hill, and as I roll downward, my breaks chattering like the squirrels I'm chasing off the road, the leaves are only recognizable by color. Brown (oak), yellow (maple), red (is that poplar?) and the black of the underlying asphalt fly by as I focus on keeping on my two wheels and not on my back in a muddy pile or bouncing on my yellow helmet over the handlebars. BrownYellowBlackRed. Then at the bottom, runoff from last night's rain in a deep puddle across the pavement; I part it like Moses with my two tires, drenching my shoes and my back.

Then up again.
Oak.
Maple.
Beech.
Oak.

Forty-five minutes on my bike at lunch feels like a day off. As I crest the final hill on Druid Hill's backstretch, time stretches; what took twenty minutes feels like a weekend. I slow, roll around the end of the yellow traffic gate, and pedal on.

I have started to depend on The Bike for my endorphin rush of the day. My daily rides are no more than 6 to 8 miles–there's no telling, really, since I have no odometer and I can't drive the route to clock it off–but they are battles with Baltimore's hills and terrain, journeys off the beaten path and back to it. I know I'm getting better because I spend an increasingly smaller amount of the ride in “granny gear”, keeping it in mid-range even on most of the uphills.

God and snow willing, I will get my bike fix all the way through the winter. There's nowhere in our little rowhouse to set up a stationary bike for the offseason, and that matters little–you can't name the passing leaves on a stationary.