It’s easy to feel discouraged in these late-winter days, where here in Rhode Island the rain has continued, and continued, and continued until the rivers overflow and the streets have become pockmarked with holes.  With the holidays behind, and the warm days of Summer still waiting over the horizon, sometimes it seems like there is little to feel good about, especially when your favorite local business, where you used to go for coffee, cables, pinball, and a sympathetic ear is now just another vacant storefront on a run-down former retail corridor on the way out of town.

Part of living in New England is to love the feeling of history.  Just as the rain brings needed life to our reservoirs and nourishes our crops and garden even as it soaks our spirits, it is crucial to remember that there can be no history without the passage of time from things the ‘way they were’  to things in the present, and the certainty that one way or another, each day takes the place of another, bringing a new temperature, a new wind, and, when the crusty snows and gritty gutters are washed away, a renewed chance for scooterists to smell their engines and see the small shoots of a new garden make their first push up from the ground.

Sometimes life in Rhode Island can seem like living in a coded place, where it helps to know where something ‘used to be’ when getting directions from the locals.  It takes some time to learn how much more there is to the landscape than the exits of Interstate 95, and to even come to understand that the divided highway is just a recent overlay on an old network of roads and paths that can actually take you anywhere you need to go, and sometimes even take you a little bit into the past on your way- just the way an old scooter can.  The closure of a bridge or a street for needed re-construction can seem like a disastrous inconvenience, until some patience and maybe some advice reveals that there is always a way to get where you need to go.

There is nothing wrong with a moment’s sadness at the time of change.  Let the curling of an Autumn leaf, the melting of a snowman, or the shortening days of late Summer turn your thoughts to the passing of time, reflect on what was loved, and let that sadness become wisdom, even as another day brings with it new opportunities.

There is no more scooter coffee shop on North Main Street, just as there is no more gun  shop and no more S&W greenstamp store in the space that they had all occupied at their various times on that old Post Road out of the City of Providence that Roger Williams walked.  That is just a physical place.  A business is gone, a vision was pursued, and many people enjoyed the chance to have a place that was unique, quirky, and as passionate as our Biggest Little colony on the bay.

There will, however, always be something important to the scooter enthusiasts of New England in a place that is not an address, a location that is defined by people with a shared enthusiasm, and a way of enjoying our home and our friends in a place that can always be found Where JavaSpeed Used to Be.