Mom & Me, Key West, Florida
As an adult, I have enjoyed bike rides with each person in my family-of-origin, independent of one another. This is not a goal I realized I had ’til it was accomplished.
I’m from a project-based family. We like to do things, collect experiences, learn, examine, uncover, understand. And we like bikes!
I remember being a little thing and my paternal grandfather’s adult-sized tricycle. The sound of bike tires bumping over a boardwalk’s wooden slats. Family mythology has it that same tricycle once ran over my mother’s foot, by accident.
I recall the thick, this-might-be-chemical-y-dangerous smell of grease and seeing bikes in bits in my back yard, old chains soaking in a pickle tub, waiting to be scrubbed silver.
My brother & me on a Princeton, NJ bike tour
My Strawberry Shortcake Big Wheel; the red tricycle belonging to a neighborhood kid that we’d zip around on like it was a scooter ’til our backs ached; the pretty, blue Columbia that was stolen from my front porch, gone possibly a long time before I noticed. Barreling down broke-up concrete sidewalks from 8th Avenue to 7th, back around to 8th, no adult accompanying me because, as long I stuck to the sidewalk, no need. Learning that freedom can be bought at Toys-R-Us and sized up when my legs grew too long.
Place to place, and person to person. Child to sibling to parent.
Dad on Somerville Library Bike Tour
Fun in a Somerville lot with Dad and Dave
There’s nothing like that early love, or the connections it offers. The relationships it helps sustain.
Phoebe on a winding MA road
Phoebe Sinclair Writes 