into the wild (continued)

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I don't think I can coherently explain it, but show me a naked girl with bicycle and I go nuts. Even better on a bicycle.

Well, I know where it comes from. Back in the day girls used to come to river to swim on bicycles. They would push the bicycles over the field to the bushes, then remove their clothes, leaving those on the bicycles and run the rest of the way down the riverbank already nude. Sometimes she, the older of two sisters, would come alone and take a book with her, and read nude by the river for hours.

And on the way out they sometimes won't dress as soon as they get to bicycles, but push them, naked, with clothes on them out to the road, and only then, on the roadside put the clothes, often as little as a tiny sundress on to drive the less than a mile over to their house. And I thought why, it was a secluded country road, no houses in sight. But truth was, they couldn't be seen that way at home. If they mother visited and come along they wore swimsuits. But not the cousin, or her mother their aunt, they were skinny dipping too but with more circus and getting their swimsuits wet first. A couple of their friends were the same way. In eight or nine summers the most was six girls, all naked there at once. The men of ther house? I didn't know them, there were two or three or more, rarely saw any and they never come down to the river, not there at least. Suppose, they could go up to the bridge, if they did. Supposedly they didn't know, shouldn't, that the girls swam naked.

Their grandmother knew of course, she had chosen the place. I knew her, I went over the bridge to buy milk from her. Sometimes she called the younger of those two sisters just to bring the can up from the cellar and pour into mine, but I have never talked to that girl, she was that shy. The old witch had been a lover of my grandfather before he married my grandmother, but he had dismissed her as a bride for seeing her work in the roadside garden in the nude. That was before the war, before communists had invented swimsuits (or so he claimed, wrongly, but he hadn't ever seen those things before the occupation). So no, that wasn't about nudity, it was about where it was displayed. He had a time and place for everything.

But yes, the unmistakable sound of a girl stepping off her bicycle, it's burned into my mind as a matting call.
How lucky were you to experience the river girls?! Sounds like someone needs to run a bike shop...😜💡🚵‍♀️
 
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