My first bicycle was a present from Santa when I was five years old. It was baby blue, and Batgirl was sitting on the bike seat when I woke up Christmas morning.
It had training wheels at first, but by summer's end, my father took them off and, holding on to me, or so I thought, sent me off down the road. By the time I realized he was no longer holding on, I'd gone a long way on my own. I didn't need the training wheels anymore.
Generally speaking, I did not ride my bike at home as much as I rode a bicycle at my grandmother's house. By the time I was 8 or 9, we were all riding bikes, even my brother who would have only been 5 or 6. I guess the bikes belonged to my departed uncles and aunt, maybe even my mother, I can't remember.
In any event, when we stayed with Grandma over the summer, she shooed us out the door, and inevitably, we'd take a bike ride.
Here is our route, as seen today from Google Earth with mark-ups:
The green line is the bike route. We'd start off from Grandma's house, go to the right from this picture, and ride around that circle. The squiggly lines on the left-hand side indicate the maze of a path we created in the pine trees that the Forestry Department had planted behind their building. All of us kids around there rode our bikes through the pine trees, sometimes for hours as our bikes turned into steeds and we chased after one another.
This is where we were supposed to ride, in that circle. Sometimes we'd dare one another to ride up to the green line on the right, where there was a rickety old empty house. We called it the haunted house, so riding up to it was an important dare.
As we got older, we rode around the big building labeled "Mom's Office" down in the lower part of the picture. We weren't supposed to do that because we might run into a vehicle or have a car back into us or whatever reason the adults could find, but we would do it occasionally anyway, whizzing past my mother in her front office in hopes she didn't see us. Mostly she didn't. Sometimes she did. Oops.
When we were even older, say 10, we could take our bikes across Apperson Drive to the Orange Market so long as we used the stoplight. And on Fridays, we could ride our bikes beside Grandma while she walked up to Aunt Neva's to do her hair. That was always hard because we weren't supposed to cross Apperson at that location (no stoplight) unless Grandma was watching and of course she was walking so we had to ride up and down and up and down and do circles around her until we reached a safer area.
The yellow squares I added are where there were once houses or buildings. The remaining house on the right hand end of the block belonged to my grandmother's brother, Uncle Curt, and his wife, Aunt Elsie. My two cousins, Tim and Pam, lived there and sometimes they played with us but Aunt Elsie didn't let them out very much. Other kids - mostly boys - lived around the block, too, and we'd all ride around together at various times. I remember a Journell boy and I think a boy named Dennis (?) lived behind my grandmother's house. I'm not sure that's right. My brother might remember.
The river back then was lined with trees all the way up to the road. That was a tangled jungle we were also supposed to stay away from, but somehow there were paths that led down to the water for fishing or wading. I can't imagine how they got there.
At home on the farm, bike riding was complicated by the dirt road and gravel. A wipe out there was actually worse than one on the asphalt at Grandma's, because the gravel would embed itself into your knees or elbows.
My blue bike died a violent death when my father backed over it with a truck. My brother had been riding it and left it there. I received a whipping for "not taking care of my things" even though I'd been out with my mother and had no idea my brother had left it behind the truck. I'm sure I deserved many of the whippings I received, but I definitely remember the unfair ones, which that one was.
That bike was replaced by a green three-speed that I didn't ride much. I started driving when I was 13 - a beat up ol' Jeep that was manual transmission - and I guess bikes lost their allure after that.
The very last bicycle I owned was a purchase I made in the early 1990s. I had decided I should take up bike riding for my health. I rode it around the exterior of the house a few times, parked it, and asked my husband to take it back to the store. It terrified me. I was too high off the ground. I had no balance. Whatever riding a bicycle in childhood had given me, by the time I was in my 30s, it was gone.
