I can’t quite remember the genesis of this. I think I was remembering memorable Christmas gifts, and this was definitely one. Also Doug has the bike mounted on a fence post at the end of our driveway, so I see it every day LOL.
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A whoop of joy Christmas morning startled the coffee-perked parents
as their three barefoot girls discovered bikes with bows under the tree.
Three Schwinn bikes
the color of orchard: orange, lemon, lime.
10-speed boys' bikes with skinny seats and ram horn handlebars wrapped with bright tape.
The girls bunched up their nightgowns and rode the bikes in a circle
around the basement, their feet dimpled by the gripper pedals.
All winter the girls dreamed of wind in their hair,
tick-tick-tick of the wheels turning,
chunka-chunk of the gears shifting.
Come spring they rode those bikes everywhere. The girl on the orange Schwinn
rode fast enough a streak of orange streamed at her ear like an oriole chirping urgency.
Ribboning roads unfurled their orangeade possibility.
She pedaled and pedaled.
She could hardly stop.
She rolled through intersections
until a neighborly cop warned her to put her foot down. She rode the Schwinn where the cars couldn't go,
off-road in the woods behind the park,
pedaling into dawn's marmalade and sunset's dying fire.
She carried essentials in a rack with a steel arm stay.
Her swimsuit into summer at the magic bean of a lake.
Books from the library where squares of tangerine light shapeshifted on the thin carpet.
Treats and games to a babysitting job on the other side of the highway
where she looked after two impish boys with Orange Crush smiles.
The girl rode her bike to school most mornings,
parking the orange Schwinn under a flag pole
where she could see it from the cafeteria window.
Her first love left her poems on the orange Schwinn,
weaving slips of paper around the steel arm stay.
Rhyming poems with words like "neat" and "sweet."
She smiled her clementine smile and kept the poems in a pencil box
in her bookbag, which rattled as she rode bittersweet, burnt orange, neon carrot.
As dusk snuffed each day, she pedaled harder, the generator light chirring and whirring,
sparking licks of orange-red flame.
She slept in its apricot glow,
urgency sleeping with her,
waiting for morning.