bike loop

Moving with a child feels different once you realize kids don’t only attach to homes. They attach to puddles, bike routes, neighborhood cats, cracked sidewalks, wind chimes, backyard sounds, and the invisible rhythms of daily life.

In this episode, Kathy reflects on childhood memory, emotional geography, elder millennial Zillow spirals, and the tiny sensory details that quietly become the backdrop of a life.

hosted by Kathy Patalsky

healthyhappylife.com

IG: KathyPatalsky + notes.kathy

Transcript

Kathy Patalsky 0:01

I stare at my phone glowing in the dark, and I realize children attach themselves to these invisible parts of a life. Tiny textures that become a part of a child's emotional map of the world. You're listening to notes with Kathy Putowski. Today's episode, Bike Loop. I took a few weeks off from this podcast. The rhythm of this podcast is that I'm not forcing myself to post. That's the flow of creativity. Sometimes I will want to record five episodes in one day, and then I'll go for weeks at a time where life just takes hold of me and I'm not recording anything. Sispodcast, it's an archive of my thoughts. And thoughts don't just come when you want them to. So with that said, I'm glad to be back again. This episode is called Bike Loop. And here it is. For a while now, we've been wanting to move. Not wanting exactly, more like our commute is driving me crazy. And I want to be closer to our core friends and most of our activities and a million other little things. So even though we adore our home, I'm stuck in that elder millennial loop of waking up, checking Zillow, and browsing to see whether or not my perfect unicorn home popped up overnight. And spoiler alert, it hasn't yet. And anybody who's ever moved knows that once you get on track of moving, it gets in your brain, it's very hard to get off. Your brain wakes up at three in the morning thinking about some new house you want or some old house you miss. And suddenly you've been awake for two hours and scanning your whole life before your body even catches up to the sun rising. And when I do this, for some reason, the main thing that keeps twirling through my brain is my daughter's bike loop. The trees, the cracked pavement, the way one part of the street is so straight and long and flat that you can see 20 trees ahead of you. Whenever we hop on our bikes or our scooters, it's the exact same two routes every time. And she knows them by heart. And I know she knows them because I'm 45 years old and I still remember my own bike loop from when I was her age. I remember how the sidewalks bent up and down before each driveway. I remember staring up at the warm, glowing street lamps and thinking they looked like tiny houses perched on top of giant poles, with tiny people inside turning the lights on and off every night. I remember closing my eyes and whispering to them, talking to them. I remember getting closer to the ocean and hearing it roar like lifting a seashell to your ear right at the end of our street. I remember circling around that one street that looped into another street. I remember pedaling faster when I hit the main road so that I could get back to the quieter side streets. I remember biking along dirt paths by the beach, bumping around over rocks and brushing against blackberry bushes and those tall, feathery plants that dropped fluffy seeds into the air. I still don't know what those are called. What are they called? Does anybody know? I remember the sound of my brakes and the clicking of my chain when I changed gears. I oh, pompous grass. I think they're called pompous grass, you guys. Sorry. I remember the front yard with the Japanese garden. There was that girl Allison that used to live there, and then the girl Heather that lived on the corner, who was also on my tennis team. I remember how far away the little grocery store felt when we bike there for candy and soda and Chaco Tacos. I remember that one house that redid their cement driveway and they poured these pebbles into the hole. And I remember we'd walk by and we'd say, That looks like chocolate. Are they pouring chocolate on their driveway? I remember all of it. So now, even though my daughter is five, almost six, I know she's gonna remember her first bike loop too. Or at least I hope she does. And so at three in the morning when I'm scrolling real estate apps in the dark, I close my eyes and I can feel her loop. The things we notice together, the tiny puddle that appears in front of the same house because their sprinklers seem to leak, or someone overwaters the lawn, or maybe the drainage just isn't quite right on that property. It's this giant puddle that she desperately hopes is there every ride so she can splash through it. And it shimmers in one giant lake after a big rain. And that one fluffy gray cat a few streets over that sometimes lays under parked cars and sometimes hangs out in the garage that's always halfway open for him to crawl in and out of. There's the giant rose bushes that she always stops and smells. There's the agave plant that brushes her leg with its sharp thorn if she rides too close. The cracks in the sidewalk from the towering magnolia trees, cracks that she has memorized by heart, the big ones she has to pause and walk over instead of bike over. Then there's the house with the two fountains in Messi Garden. She stops there every single time and reports whether there are one fountain, two fountains, or no fountains on on that particular day. She checks on them like she's the neighborhood manager. Honestly, she should be carrying a clipboard and handing out stickers at her favorite houses. The squirrels she thinks recognize us, and they probably do. There's the black crows bouncing from tree to tree looking at you like they know more than you do. And they probably do. There's a skyline of trees and airplanes overhead. There's that little utility section in the sidewalk where she parks her bike because she says she's charging it up like a solar-powered robot docking station. And these are the things that cycle through my brain at three in the morning. I stare at my phone glowing in the dark, and I realize children attach themselves to these invisible parts of a life. These tiny textures of everyday life that become a part of a child's emotional map of the world. I see kids noticing everything. They notice the tree that blooms pink, then turns white and drops petals all over the sidewalk. The sounds of the wind chimes on the street, that one dog who knows how to shake hands in high five. Children experience neighborhoods, the way pirates build maps. Not through street names or property values, but through landmarks. That fountain house, the rose house, the garage cat, the giant tree, the puddle, the scary hill, the street that the ice cream man always goes down. The house with the Halloween witch, the yard with the trampoline, the place where you once fell. She were always remembers the spots where she fell once. Or that spot where I dropped the toy, and then we had to go all the way home and come all the way back to find it. Everything becomes emotional geography instead of actual geography. And I think all of these feelings get amplified living here in Los Angeles. Because life here is just so scattered. Everything is spread apart. School is in one direction, dance is in another. You spend huge parts of your life moving through the city all day long, like pirates. Home starts feeling less like one stop in your life and more like the emotional anchor you keep returning to after floating all day long. A little safe harbor. You leave it every morning and you return to it every night, carrying pieces of the entire day back with you. When the whole city feels big and sprawling and loud and constantly moving, those tiny familiar rhythms of home become even more sacred. And it's not just the neighborhood, it's the home too. It's the sound that the screen door makes, the glow of the porch light, the birds at sunrise chirping just for us, the background noise of gardeners on certain mornings, the sound of kids laughing somewhere a few houses over, the splash of a pool behind our fence, the loud metal boom when the mailman closes the mailbox, the smell of the wet grass after the sprinklers, and the squeak of our trampoline. It's the smell of the grapefruit blossoms blooming, the face of the fluttering hummingbird who loves our orange flower tree. And once I started thinking about homes this way, the way children feel them, the way I still remember them, moving stopped feeling like a real estate decision and started feeling like I'm rearranging the backdrop of her childhood. And that feels both terrifying and mesmerizing. Because her friends, her neighbors in this home, they're not always people. They're places, their smells, textures, and rhythms, the feeling of knowing exactly what comes next when you turn the corner. She knows where our two cats hide during the day and where they bask in sunbeams. She knows where I hide the remote when I don't want her turning on the TV. And she knows the sound of the freezer when you open and close it for a popsicle. She notices the smell of the house when we're baking cookies. Some of these things we can bring with us wherever we go. And some of these things we can't. And I think that's the heartbreak of moving with a child. Adults understand that these textures come and go throughout life. We've already lived through so many versions of it. We miss random things forever. Old houses, old jobs, old schools. I miss that one shower from that one apartment because of the way the sunlight hit the steam in the middle of the day. The vintage, creaky wood floors, the way they were so worn down they shined. I miss that one fluffy squirrel that used to sit on my balcony at one of our condos. I miss the floor-to-ceiling windows from one of our first apartments in New York City. The way I could smell the food cart down on Ludlow Street when I opened the windows. I miss our condo in DC and the way I used to walk to Whole Foods and the bookstore and that restaurant that served the best sangria. I miss the plum tree from my childhood backyard and the fig tree. The one so tall and fluffy and strong that I could climb to the top and sit perched in the elastic branches when I needed a break from people and just wanted the smell of bark and leaves and fresh air. The sunny deck where I had lay out in the sun for hours with my boom box palaul cassette tapes and a bottle of Hawaiian tropic tanning oil, like I was at some luxury resort for teenagers. The cobblestone path in our old backyard, the exact spot where we buried our cat gray, my bird pearl, and that apple tree that made the best tiny crisp green apples. I still remember those things, and I know one day my daughter will too. And when I think about all the textures and tiny details that she still has left to discover in her life, I actually feel at ease in all of this. That's the feeling that I want to move forward with.com. A tiny little side note.