Back Yard Biker

Just as with swimming and gymnastics, I got started riding a bike long after most other kids in my class.  I was perfectly content with my training wheels and saw no need to make changes.  My mother thought otherwise.  She eventually told me that I had to learn to ride my bike without the training wheels.

My mother decided that the back yard was the best place to teach me how to ride a bike.  If I fell, it would only be on grass.  The downside was that our back yard is a giant hill.  I mean, a half acre hill, literally.  The most flat spot in the yard was right by my swing set.  Mom walked around with me for a while, holding the bike up while I tried to figure out what to do.  Finally she said it was time for her to try letting go.  I started to bike and she let go of me and I rode my bike beautifully...right into the swing set.  I mean really, who sends their kid off on their own for the first time straight into a rusting metal death trap?  Luckily I wasn't injured much and was able to get up and try again.  I was waiting for mom to hold on to me but she said I had to figure it out and walked away.  She proceeded to sit on the back porch and watch me ride my bike into the swing set a dozen more times before I finally started catching on.   I was riding a bike, I was ready to go out and show the world.

Or not...after watching me almost kill myself practicing in the back yard my mom decided that the neighborhood was too dangerous for me to ride around.  She didn't want me to get hit by a car.  And, of course, since our front yard is also a hill, I couldn't ride there because I might lose control and accidentally ride into the street and get hit by a car.  She decided that I was only allowed to ride my bike in the back yard instead of out front with the rest of the neighborhood kids.  Welcome to the start of my life with no friends.  

I loved riding my bike and the hill in the yard only made it more fun.  I would ride to the very back/top of the yard close my eyes, raise my hands up to the sky and fly down the hill until I was too scared not to look.  I had pretty good timing but every once in a while I would open my eyes too late and smash into the chain link fence at the bottom.  I only have one scar to show from those rides.  I had cut it too close one time and swerved to avoid the fence a little too late.  My leg scraped along the fence and caught a jagged piece of metal scrapping all the way up my leg.  And my mother thought the back yard was safe. 

I turned the back yard into my own little imaginary town.  The garden was the grocery store and the shed the hardware store.  I would ride around on my imaginary streets pretending there were people in the "stores" to talk to.  My mother never let me out of that back yard.

I have gone back now that I am an adult and ridden my grown up bike around on the street right in front of her house.  Just because I can.