A Widow's Ride

A part of me wants to believe that there is one but the other part of me does not. The same goes that a part of me believes in a higher power and the other part of me do not believe that there is only one God. As you may remember that I’m still get upset when someone say that “God has other plans for him” and I’m still angry at the higher power for taking him away from me too soon.

So you may be asking why I’m questioning myself about God and the afterlife. Well something happened recently that is once again making me question my belief.

Let me start from the beginning of what happened. Since my husband passed away, he left quite a mess on the property for me to deal with. My son and his girlfriend have been coming up every other weekend helping me clean up the yard and taking pictures of the motorcycles (twenty-three of them), vehicles and miscellaneous items to put on Craigslist to sell. After a long day, I decided to treat them to dinner at an Italian restaurant. Since we were close to the cemetery, I wanted to head over there to show them the paver that was installed. While we were there we noticed a bike that sort of look like a TW200 and decided to take a closer look. The closer we got, we realized it wasn’t a TW200 but it sister bike the Yamaha BW200. It was only produced for 4 years from 1985 to 1989 and the biggest difference between the two bikes is that the BW had a fat front tire as well on the back whereas the TW has a skinny front tires and a fat tire on the back.

While looking at the bike, we noticed a lizard under the bike, not just an ordinary average looking small lizard that you skirting across the sidewalk. It was a size of a gecko. The kids and I looked at each other and shook our heads. We decided to pay a visit to the Percheron draft horse that resides at the cemetery. As we were walking over there, we noticed that the lizard was following us. We stopped midway and so did the lizard. We continue to take several steps and then stop, so did the lizard. While we were at the corral, the lizard stayed a few feet away from us. We kept looking at it and it kept looking at us. Finally, it was getting dark and we decided it was time to head on home. As we were driving out of the cemetery, we had to pass the corral on the way out and that where we saw the lizard again, inside of the corral with the horse. My late husband nickname was lizrdbrth and he loved horses and motorcycles (as his friends would say “steel horses”). As matter of fact, he rode his horse across the United States on a horse following Route 66.

When I got home, I had to research to see what kind of lizard it was since I never seen it before. I stared at my computer screen in disbelief and started laughing when I discovered it was called a Mojave fringe-toed lizard. My late husband favorite place to ride his TW200 was the Mojave Road.

Does this experience convince me that there is an afterlife? I don’t know yet but it sure does make me question my belief system. Like Jon Meacham once said “Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is not faith.”