Time-Warp Wednesday

Last week, I highlighted the frosty, frozen tundra that was our backyard when we were growing up.  It was vast.  It was flat.  And in the summer, it was (sorta) grassy.  Imagine trying to water an acre of grass and mow it ... yeah, it was more like pasture-land than a yard.

But we still spent a lot of time there:  following our ducks around (quack, quack, quack ...), running through the sprinklers (and trying to miss the really scratchy grass that would shred your tender feet), and riding our bikes.  In the grass? you say.  Well ... yeah.  If given the option of riding our bikes on the rocky, dirt road in front of the house, on the 5-foot sidewalk outside the front door or biking around in circles in the "grassy" meadow, we inevitably chose the yard.  There was definitely better bounce in the pseudo-grass than in the real-deal rocks.  And there was another great perk ... the pseudo bike-ride.

In several places in the back-forty there were holes that had been dug for horse-shoe pits.  This consisted of a small divot of dirt with raised sides.  My sister and I discovered one day, perhaps out of sheer luck, perhaps out of sheer laziness, that if we had our training wheels on and if we positioned our bikes just so, we could have the training wheels on the grass and the back wheel spinning freely in the pit.  With this particular arrangement, we could bike for days without going anywhere, uphill or down.  We could imagine ourselves as secret agents biking (?) from international hot-spot and back to HQ without ever actually leaving our yard.  We could go really, really fast without any real danger or energy spent.  My kind of biking!  Sometimes we would clothes-pin playing cards to the wheels to enhance our biking excitement.  Now we were going "fast" and we had "engines".

Periodically we would free our bikes from the pits and actually bike across the yard, past the woodpile, down the little rock path and back around the house ... but we always ended up back in the yard in the bike pits ... speeding along in the same place.

I loved my bike:  blue and white with a banana seat ...

Someday, maybe I'll get a bike so that I can toodle along with the kids.  It'll probably have to be blue, but this time I want a basket and maybe a bell.  And this time, I'll probably actually leave the yard ... and leave the training wheels behind, too!

Thank you for praying for my mother-in-love yesterday.  She came through her surgery very well and is now on the road to recovery.  Of course, we would still covet your prayers for her healing, freedom from pain and her rehab as she begins to learn how to walk with her prosthetic foot.  Thank you!