Squeezing the Lemmon

Making good on a year-long promise

I know I’m not the only one who feels like they’ve travelled through some other-worldly quantum time vortex in the last five years. There are actual neuroscientists studying and writing about this phenomenon and giving logic to the reason our brains have calculated the experience of that time so differently.

My own pandemic-era vortex started on Labor Day 2019 when my mom called.

“Dad’s dead.”

His death came as such a shock that four and a half years later, I re-live the moment at least once a week to remind myself he’s actually gone. I replay Mom’s voice over our wireless connection as clearly as the blisteringly hot day back in 2019, and each time I have to stop my legs from giving way underneath me and stifle the shout rising up in my throat like a reflexive gag. Each time I practice remembering, it gets a tiny bit easier to stay upright in my body.

I’d actually already been spinning in the vortex for three months by the time Mom called. My marriage was on the verge of collapse the previous June, and I’d started an MFA writing program in July. I had only just started to think I might survive when Dad left us well before he or any of us were ready.

The heart attack happened on Saturday. He was out on a training hike in preparation for an adventure through Grand Canyon he and Mom were planning to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. I know, I know. #couplesgoals

A month after he didn’t wake up, I went with Mom instead.

Me and Mom the evening before our through hike from the South to North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Oct 2019

What you should know about my mother is that she’s the best athlete I know.

Anne Flanagan is part of the pioneering Title IX group. She was on the first women’s track team at the University of Arizona, and I was proud to follow in her footsteps as a legacy athlete and become a letter-winning swimmer for the University of Arizona. Mom hates it when I brag that she won the very first Austin Marathon, but how can I not? She bought a road bike in 2009 and has become an accomplished cyclist in the local scene over the last fifteen years. This year she’s also added rowing to her ever-growing repertoire.

Mom and me: Rim to Rim complete, Oct 2019

Hiking the canyon with mom was the most healing thing I did on my grief journey. On the flight home from Phoenix, we vowed to do more of this. More adventure travel. More challenges. Mom and I have always shared our love of movement and competition, and we both knew that we could use this common ground to soothe our matching broken hearts.

Then the pandemic and travel restrictions happened. Life got complicated. We lost Greg’s dad as unexpectedly as we lost mine. When the skies finally opened to allow to travel, I wanted to go away with Greg and the kids (and just Greg - adult travel is my love language in this current stage of life, though the kids are becoming exponentially better travel companions as each day passes). I returned from a family ski trip in Montana last January with a souvenir broken shoulder and a deep desire to rekindle this promise with Mom. Something had shifted, and it was time to make a plan.

“I want to be the kind of person who takes trips with her mom,” I told her when I got home just after the new year. With my arm in a sling and a promise from my orthopedist to be feeling better in twelve months, I was thinking we might start slow on a beach somewhere in Mexico looking for shells, but Mom had another idea.

“Let’s ride Mt. Lemmon,” she suggested.

During my undergraduate years, my friends and I made the scenic drive up the mountain just outside of Tucson to escape the oppressive heat of a never-ending summer. We’d hike and eat pie at the cafe in Summerhaven. Some years, there’s snow enough to ski. When Mom mentioned the challenge, I remembered with a tiny bit of panic the hairpin turns from the vantage of the back of a motorcycle my sophomore year (YOLO! Sorry, Mom, and don’t tell my kids).

The last time I spent serious time training on my bike was in 2009 leading up to the Ironman triathlon World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. I fell in love with Greg and cycling at the same time. My cute boyfriend, Greg, took me on my first ride, taught me how to change a tube, and was such a good bike mechanic that I embarrassingly failed to properly learn a lot of what I should have about caring for my steed. Cycling came more naturally to me than running or even swimming, and some of my greatest memories of those early dating years were made on country roads around central Texas. We rode long and often, ate good food, and drank good beers afterward. We sold our matching speedy triathlon bikes years ago for models that made more sense for riding alongside kids, but it didn’t take long for Greg to catch wind of my plan with Mom. For my birthday last March, I brought a sparkly green bike home, and I’ve squeezed in what I can in the way of training over the last year. Which is to say that I probably should have been riding more, but hopefully what I’ve managed will be enough.

In three weeks, Mom and I will be climbing the switchbacks to the top of Mount Lemmon. The quantum time vortex spun us around and around, and spit us back out. I’m not sure how we got here, but my youngest child is twice as old now as she was when we hopped into the time machine all those year (wasn’t it just months?) ago. Maybe this is just the way of middling middle-ish age.

Here’s to finding enough new adventures to trick our minds into slowing down our fleeting time. I can’t wait to rope my own two daughters into these glorious adventures. Unless they’d rather sit on a beach. I’d be down for that too.