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COPYRIGHT 2002 Mothering Magazine
Every spring, a bicycle path near our house slowly converts itself from a frozen dirt trail through a silhouette of trees and dried brambles into a leafy green tunnel. Stinkweed, nettles, and huge stands of rhubarb spring from the warming earth, bursting from dormancy. Blackberry bushes, sumac, bitter-sweet, and scrub hardwoods fill in the middle tier. Overhead, new leaves define a growing network of maple, oak, and cottonwood branches, which will soon block most of the light.
By the first week of June, the wooden frame homes and apartments that line the path disappear behind the swaying walls of green. You can no longer see around or beyond the trail's frequent bends and turns. It is a comforting blindness, one I look forward to. Coasting along the bumpy path on my old Raleigh three-speed through the heart of suburbia with my two daughters riding ahead of me, there is nothing I want to know less than exactly where we are or where we're going.
We never go very far. But for the girls, the pathway may as well be a national forest. Tessa, who is seven, learned to ride last year. She races ahead of us and doubles...
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