It’s two miles from the old depot to Main Street.
I put my purse in the basket. I buttoned my cardigan. It was a bright morning, cool in the shade. The fields were just greening up on either side of the trail. The red-winged blackbirds were going at it on every single fence post.
“Follow me,” I told Wilma. “In case I end up in a ditch.”
“I’m going to follow you with my flashers on,” she said. “Like a funeral.”
“Like a parade,” I said.
And I pushed off.
I’ll tell you what I’d forgotten.
I’d forgotten that on a bicycle, the air moves.
In a car, the world goes by on the other side of the glass, like a picture show. On that trike, it came right up against my face. I could smell fresh-cut grass and manure and somebody’s bacon. I could hear my own tires on the trail.
The first half mile, my legs complained.
The second half mile, they stopped complaining and started working.
I’m a woman who has walked to the mailbox and back twice a day for forty years, and hoed her own beans every summer. It turned out there was a good deal more left in me than my son had figured on.
Where the trail meets Depot Street, I had to go out onto the pavement. Wilma was right behind me in her Ford at about six miles an hour with both flashers blinking.
A man at the feed mill was loading sacks into the back of a pickup. He stopped with a sack on his shoulder and stared at me.
Then he took off his cap.
I rang my bell at him.
By the time I passed the bank, my thighs were burning. And I was smiling like a fool.
I did not lean.
Hale Insurance is a storefront on Main Street, between the old dime store that’s an antique mall now and the bakery. It has Brian’s name painted on the front window in gold letters.
His father and I paid for those gold letters the year he opened.
I brought the trike up over the low curb at the corner. I rolled it down the sidewalk. And I stopped it square in front of his window.
I put one foot down.
Through the glass, Mandy, his receptionist, stood straight up out of her chair.
Mandy has worked for Brian for nine years. She’s a kind girl, forty or so. She has a grandmother in the nursing home in the county seat and visits her every single Sunday.
She put her hand over her mouth. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or not. I don’t think she could either.
Then the door to the back office opened. And my son came out to see what she was looking at.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.