Accidents and Incidents

   I spent quite a lot of time outside today, tending to my plants and sitting on the front step. I watched the motorcycles go by, thinking everybody who owned one was riding today. I saw 2 groups of 4 cycles, with rider and passenger on each, as well as a few single rider motorcycles some minutes later. Then several bicyclists drove by. They all looked so free and I imagined happy to be enjoying the beautiful weather. I remarked (to myself of course) that most of the motorcyclists  appeared to be heavy, portly, to be kind, while the bicyclists were slender as reeds. I hoped all of them would be safe, knowing the risks cyclists take sharing the road with automobiles.
    I read this evening of a fatality in Pittstown, between Tomhannock and Croll Road. A motorcycle and a vehicle evidently collided head on and the motorcyclist died. Death occurs on a sunny day.
    I was reminded of what was probably the closest call to an accident that I have had in a lot of years, and right in the village of Valley Falls. Friday morning I was driving home from the post office when a vehicle shot out from the "trashed house" across from Catone's.  The SUV type thing didn't enter the road straight, but drove at a slant into the wrong lane and almost directly in front of my car, almost as if they were trying to merge, though they were driving in the wrong lane.  Of course, I was driving at a low speed and braked when I saw it pulling in ahead of my car from what seemed to be alongside my car. I don't know who lives there, in what once was Lou Bonesteel's house. There seems to be a number of young people in residence there among the garbage, which is all over the yard and bulging out of the windows of the house which most probably will be scheduled for demolition at some future date.