First, something else I didn’t do for money: I recently published a collection of poems that I’ve written over the past five years into a small poetry book. My commemoration of a season of being mostly at home full-time with small kids, it is called Small Prints, a title taken from a blog post by the same name, and is available for purchase here!

At the end of the month, we put a final sticker on April 30.

“We did it!” my daughters declare. “We rode the bike at least once every school day in April!”

I’m a well-documented lover of a good challenge. I’ve committed to time outside, daily poems, and wearing a single dress for a rather extended period, but this one wasn’t actually my idea. On the first day of April, my firstborn returned from school telling me that it was Earth Month, and a such that we needed to “do something.”

“Like… we need to drive less,” she said, thinking aloud. “I know! We can ride our bike every school day!”

A few notes: By “our bike” she meant the giant, electric cargo bike that the three of us—two girls, one mom—tend to ride around our neighborhoods. Which means that by “we,” of course, she meant “Mom.”

My translation: “Mom, my idea for Earth Month is that we eschew driving our car in favor of you riding us to and from school and church, in four- and six-mile circuits around our hill- and lake-interrupted neighborhoods.”

So, cool.

The thing is—the thing I didn’t say when I was filled with admiration and amusement at this eight-year-old’s proposition—we usually ride more than that already. Since acquiring said if-a-minivan-and-a-bike-had-a-baby last summer, my internal resolution has been to replace all car trips under five miles with bike trips unless (and this is where it gets wiggly) there’s a good reason not to. For me, a rainy day is a good enough reason. For my zealous child, not so much.

By the terms hashed out by Luci’s Earth Month initiative, there were no good reasons not to ride. I reminded her that it was April in Seattle, a notoriously not-great month in terms of weather. I laid out the certainty that at least some days would require a ride in full-on rain, and that if I had to choose a child who would bear the brunt of those rainy trips, it would be her.

To our great surprise, there were only two solidly-rainy school days, when I appeared swathed in Gore-tex at Luci’s elementary school, greeting her with a “Hey, this was your idea!” like any normal, dripping-wet parent would. Otherwise, we’d dodge the hourly forecast, timing our rides and risking a few drops. Every day, we got at least one ride in. On good days it was three, and on the best day four (because I gamely rode my bike to an evening meeting).

And then, on April 30, we added it all up. How many miles of car travel had we replaced this month, this glorious month of intentional cycling? 154.

To my kids, this was a huge number. “That’s like riding to Oma and Papa’s house, and then back home again, and then back up there again!” I cried. They were impressed.

“That’s half a tank of gas!” I added.

“Wow!” the kids replied.

“That’s… well, that’s about $35.”

“So. Much. Money!” they duly incanted.

And I shrugged, less enthralled by my own calculations than they were. I mean, $35 is a lunch date these days. How could all of our efforts amount to so little?

A recent speaker at our local chapter of Mothers of Preschoolers recently shared a statistic that today’s children get an average of about 30 minutes of unstructured play outside each week. I’ve thought about that number often since I heard it, wondering how that could be true. To be honest, it landed the same for many of us in the room, so much so that we were still talking about it, hours later, when several of us picked our kids up at school.

We sat on the artificial turf beside the playground, somewhat affectionately referred to as the Mom Corner by our kids, and discussed. How is this possible, this 30 minutes? We watched a group of our children leave the playground after only a few minutes, migrating to the small forest on the school property to play a game only known to themselves. Don’t our kids play outside for longer than that almost every day? I mean, when it’s not raining, that is. And we don’t have gymnastics or dance or violin lessons or choir. We shrugged, concluding that we were an imperfect sample, these mothers who could hang out on a weekday afternoon to supervise unstructured play in a fenced area. Maybe everyone else is doing all those things every day, not just weekly or once in a while. More likely, in this expensive city, they’re working, and if after-school programs are anything, they are structured.

I’m still thinking about it, though, this time outside, as I consider how I’ll spend my extra $35. Because of course an e-bike was never really a cost-saving measure. (Unless you can replace the insurance and purchase of a whole car. Then it is absolutely a cost-saving measure.) I knew that, even if I’d not completely done the math on it. That wasn’t the point, so what is the point?

In my twenties I wrote an angsty short story about, among many other things, the extent to which as a professional adult it’s possible to live without considering or even noticing the weather, and a protagonist’s forced reconnection with meteorology (and also, because I was 22, with her high school crush at her family’s—I wish I was kidding—Christmas tree farm). It was a bad thing, I hypothesized in fiction, this disconnection from the earth, a circumstance only adulthood can afford.

In the years since, it seems that childhood, too, has become to a large extent weather-independent. And I find myself wondering how much worse could this get in the future. How many days there will be when it’s too hot or too smoky to go outside safely? Will they think of it as a loss, these kids? Or will they have stopped noticing, too, what’s going on outside?

In April, my daughters and I became very limited sorts of experts, skilled at assessing our few miles of bike commute for obstacles and delights. We came up with our own rules for clothing, for how to dress when it was in the 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s and 30s, all of which happened over the course of four weeks in Seattle. We smelled blooming cherry trees and drying pavement, waffle cones from the ice cream shop and bacon from the burger place. We once rode an extra six miles, down one really steep hill and up another, to catch a glimpse of a lake, a fountain, and a garden “on our way” home from a birthday party, all while trying to out-pedal a thunderstorm.

On that occasion, we watched the sky crowd over with clouds, felt the temperature drop from 70 to 60 in half an hour as falling petals swirled tornadoes over the birthday party we were attending. As we were leaving, I realized that the way home could be interesting or less interesting.

“Do you want to go back the way we came,” I asked my daughters, “Or do you want to go a different way? A pretty way? It will be way longer, but it will be pretty.”

They took no time to think about it, and down the hill we went in the opposite direction of home, under a pewter grey sky, feeling the weather change and with our eyes wide open.

Yes, we ride a bike to reduce the number of miles we drive in a car. This helps the earth a tiny bit, I suppose, in carbon not emitted, fuel not extracted. But mostly we ride to know this place, to love it, to live in it slowly and fully. If anyone is going to care for it, this earth we inhabit, it has to be people who’ve loved it first, people like these two little girls who’ll put on coats and helmets and tell me they can smell the rain coming soon, so thank goodness we’re biking now.