Grandma’s Hill

My family lived on a farm at the foot of Grandma’s hill. My sister and I used to ride our bikes to Grandma’s. These were ordinary girl’s bikes with back-pedal brakes and no gears. We rode down our north lane to the gravel and looked a half-mile west, all of it hill—steep hill. Undaunted, we would start pedaling. Within a few yards, we stood on the pedals, pumping as hard as our legs would pump. I don’t remember ever riding all the way to the top.

But, oh what rides we had going home!

A Man or a Mouse

Years later, my oldest son was a little boy when he stood at the top of that hill with his bike. Grandma saw him before he hopped on, but not soon enough to stop him. He wiped out about halfway down. When she got to him, she asked what he was thinking.

“Well,” he said, “I thought ‘am I a man or am I a mouse.’ I guess I’m a mouse,” he said, lip quivering.

And yet, like Grandma said, he did it even when he was scared.

Sandwiches

My sister and I used to ride our bikes to Grandma Hazel’s house almost every day. When we got there, we were always hungry. (That was a really big hill.) We went immediately to the ‘fridge and built sandwiches—two slices of white bread, a slice of bologna, a slice of American cheese, some lettuce, a slice of tomato, and a few cucumber slices, mortared together with Miracle Whip sandwich spread. We tried a few other ingredients such as carrot slices and a bit of zucchini, but the carrots fell out and the zucchini didn’t add any flavor to our concoctions.

Sandburs

Grandma’s place, like ours, was a farmstead and a lot of sandburs grew there—the kind with the hard seed set off by a stiff spear, like a unicorn’s horn. Sis and I called them puncture vine because we often found them in our feet. We found them in our flat bike tires, too. We’d pull out the sandburs, but we had to walk our bikes home down that wonderful hill that gave us such thrilling rides when our tires were round.

My Aunt Nina, who lived with Grandma, declared war on those sandburs. In about two years, she’d pulled and burned every sandbur on the place and we never got a flat tire at Grandma’s house. I wish we could have persuaded her to repeat the performance at our house.