This article is part of the series Life at the Pace of Sweet Tea, a 15 part series across the Deep South learning about identity, aging, adventures, and home.

It had been raining all morning. I was looking for any excuse to skip the Kickstart Vintage Motorcycle Club’s weekly meet on the other side of town. I wasn’t afraid of the rain anymore — I just didn’t want to be in it. My gear has developed this always-slightly-wet funky feel and smell that never quite showed up in California. It’s too dry there for the funk. With the event almost half over, a touch of guilt and a touch of FOMO pushed me to go anyway.

The group was smaller than last time. Only four guys, with a more homogeneous set of bikes: a Harley, a Honda Rebel, a Royal Enfield. The fourth guy drove because he didn’t want to get his pixel-perfect 1998 V-Max wet — his rationale being that the sheer torque on that bike doesn’t work on wet pavement. He’s not wrong.

As we were standing around, one of the patrons of the Foxy Loxy wandered over to check out the GS. He was there picking up his son from SCAD — the Savannah College of Art and Design — heading back home for the summer. He told his story of putting 150,000 miles on a 2000 GS, giving it to his son to keep riding, and buying another one to do it all over again. Five minutes into the conversation he invited me to come stay at his place in Phoenix, said he had a casita out back, whenever I was passing through. Just like that. That’s the best of the motorcycle community in a single moment. I returned the offer for when the summers in Phoenix get too hot.

As the rain threatened more directly, everyone quickly headed out. A quiet thought came to me: I should go see my parents.

What struck me wasn’t the thought itself — it was how simple it was. I didn’t need to book a plane ticket. I didn’t have to block off the calendar and negotiate with work. I didn’t have to pack and haul my bags cross-country through airports, planes, and Ubers. I didn’t have to manage arrival times and departure windows. They were a 25-minute ride from the meetup. I’ve been away a long time.

My mother was watching the PGA tournament, so I sat with her and my dad and watched golf from Dallas. My sister dropped off a lasagna. I watched my dad take care of my mom the way you do when love has had decades to settle into something steady and unspoken. The evening was simple and whole.

I didn’t miss a crisis. I missed the accumulation of simple evenings just like this one.

When I saw their eyes getting heavy, I hugged them both and got on the bike, grateful for a break in the clouds. Turning out of the neighborhood onto the main road, the heavens opened up anyway.

Fifteen years ago my mom gave me a painting of an old man riding his motorcycle through the pouring rain. I didn’t love it at first. At the time it felt like one of those gifts that belonged to a future version of me.

These days I understand it a little better.

I rode back toward the island through the late spring downpour thinking about all the years I spent believing the important moments would announce themselves when they arrived. Most of them don’t. Most of them look a lot like a rainy Sunday afternoon, a golf tournament I won’t remember, a pan of lasagna, and a twenty-five minute ride in the rain to see the people you love.