When Shabby-Chic No Longer Works
Bidding Farewell to a Bike
I paid $40 for the faded red and cream bike with the generous fenders and the wire basket at an outdoor vintage market and craft fair at the end of my road. I was living in southern Maine at the time, the fall of 2017, and a nearby historic farm was hosting the event. I had attended my first tractor-pull there shortly after moving in a couple years earlier from Pennsylvania, excited to move to another part of the country and begin a new chapter with my then-partner.
One of my sisters and her husband were visiting from Maryland the weekend of the fair, which turned out to be warm and sunny. My sister and I had hit up a few yard sales with our mom a few months earlier in and around our hometown in Pennsylvania. Assessing the potential of other people’s castoffs was not new to us, and I was excited to wander the vendors with her, to see all the charming, old things eager for their next chapters too.
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"And, thus, we came upon the bike…"
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And, thus, we came upon the bike with its two flat tires. I knew I would never ride the bike, so it was easy to look past that. I could picture it propped up against the weathered shingles of my early American reproduction home, with a wooden planter filled with colorful flowers sitting in the basket.
It would provide a pretty splash of color to gaze upon from the family room, or when sitting by the pool on a sunny New England summer day, or with guests at the patio table. I pulled out my cash, wheeled it home, and eventually found a perfect spot for it in a garden bed partially sheltered by an overhang near the brick patio. As the hostas in that bed filled out every summer, the flattened tires were hidden. I occasionally photographed the bike, as though it were a growing child.
Following its release from the storage unit in Maine until this past week, the bike was hibernating in my former husband’s basement in New Jersey, which is a lot bigger than mine, with high ceilings, excellent lighting, and a much newer sump pump in case of flooding. This past summer was the first since 2018 that the bike did not live outside: Its flower box was empty, the tires still flat. To me, its shabby-chic vibe did not match the energy coming from my neat and tidy little Victorian lady.
Nor would the bike feel right in my current, formally-landscaped yard. While I do have “a concept of a plan” to steadily convert my backyard to an environmentally sustainable meadow with native plants and vegetable gardens, where the vintage bike might feel right at home, that will be a multi-year project, and I am not ready to take it on. I need to stay focused on clearing out the piles of things indoors!
No, it is time to bid this bike farewell, to release it to someone who will use it now, set it up in a space that feels like home, admire and love it. Time to give this sweet, old bike its best chance at that new life. Time to set some mums in the flower box, and prop it at the curb with a big “FREE” sign on it. Time to say, “Thank you! Safe travels!”
Oh no! I’m glad he was there to rescue you! Whatever happened to the adage, “You never forget how to ride a bike??”
I knew I would enjoy catching up with you via Substack! Yes, this is a good thing, Sue. Seems so right for you. I'm on board. Your bike story says so much. My bike story is darker. As dark as the cobweb filled crawl space under our carriage barn where my bike resides. Our little Vermont village boasts Green Mountain Bikes, where people from all over buy bikes that costs as much as cars—well, some cars. Moving here at the age of 68 and not having ridden a bike for, say, over 25 years, I felt I should get back to biking, so I bought a very used "girl's bike" from the fancy store. Surely it had been a trade -in years and years ago. I imagined myself hopping on and taking off like the wind in the parking lot of the elementary school near my house. Fortunately, I was not alone for my trial run. My grown-up son, who used to work at bike shops as a teen, was there to extricate me from under the bike where it had fallen on top of me as I "hopped" on.