We each have skills and abilities, we have “knowings” and we have Spirit gifts. When we awaken to become aware of what our skills and abilities are we can begin to exercise them and make them stronger. The same is true of the more subtle gifts and “knowings” that come from Spirit.

I was born with an innate curiosity about how things work. I needed to take them apart and put them back together again. I could “see” how a thing should look just by looking at its’ pieces and seeing its’ pieces, knew how to put it together. I always knew about “frequencies” from building crystal sets to listen to a radio, learning Morse code for the telegraph key to send a message with the crystal set to one of my cousins was just normal summer fun. When computers entered my consciousness I already knew what to do with them and how to do it. The concept of software was just learning another numerical language.

I have always understood that sound, color, words, thoughts, feelings, every living thing vibrates with frequencies. People can see and sense these frequencies without even being consciously aware of them. Sometimes we want to leave a place because we feel “uncomfortable” in it. At other times we feel a need to call a friend at just the moment they feel the need to call us. These are all normal, usual and completely human gifts. We all have them. If we ignore or deny them we have them anyway, we are just more troubled by them.

As a farmer’s daughter, I knew what the animals and birds needed or wanted. I’d lie in the big barn on our farm and listen to them talking with one another or just thinking their own thoughts. I could hear the crops growing. I knew just when to pull up a carrot for a taste from our gardens. I didn’t question these “knowings” they just were.

I was six or seven when I wanted to ride a bicycle. I didn’t have one. My brother who was five years older than me had an English “racer”. It was too tall for me to get on without pushing it up to the steps or a rock or a box and then when I was on it my toes could only touch the pedals when one of them was on the “up” cycle.

I harried him relentlessly until he finally grabbed me, put me up onto the seat of his bicycle and gave it a push. I was in heaven for at least 30 seconds or however long it took me to miss the pedal with the toe of my sneakers and fall off the seat onto the bar. Gravity did the rest. The bike and I tipped over onto the ground where I thought I was dead having split myself open from bottom to top.

When the pain of that encounter was only a memory I was after that bike again. I pushed it up to anything I could get up on enough to give me a push and swing my leg over and found if I actually started out on the bar, I could reach the pedals. The only way off the bike however was the inevitable gravity fall or once with a brainstorm, I saw my way off by grabbing the mailbox with an arm and kind of tipping/bashing toward it still on the bike. Then once just once with this method, I was able to swing a leg over and jump off the bike.

Stealing my brothers’ bike had consequences. He was bigger than me and meaner. I began to envision a bicycle of my own. I could see every part of it. It wouldn’t have a bar, it looked like an English lady’s bike with a basket. It was red and had streamers from the handle grips.

I could read and knew innately that the newspaper would show me the way to my beloved bike. It did in fact. I found an advertisement in the “for sale” part of the paper for a girls bike (assembly required). It cost $13.00. I ran for the piggy bank and ruthlessly shook all the money out and pried the bottom stopper off to get to the few bills I’d put in there – all birthday and Christmas gifts from my grandparents. I had $10.97. I cut out the ad put it and the money in an envelope from mom’s desk and began to see me with that bicycle.

A few days later mom was going into town for something or other and I would get to go. I began my suit to have her loan me $2.03 which I had worked out how I could pay back and take me by the address in the paper to buy that bike. She was less than enthusiastic about my grand plan but she relented when our journeys took us close to where the bike was.

We brought home a paste-board box with parts in it. Inside that box I knew was a bicycle. Our farm had once been a much more auspicious venture than we used it for as it had a huge chicken house with nesting roosts and ramps which let the chickens walk up to their nests and down to the fenced yard where they could scratch the ground and find water. At the end of it was a small room with a pot-bellied stove in it, probably for chicks and storage for feed and other “chicken” things.

I loved that room. Mom and grandma used it as a “wash” room so the walls and floors were scrubbed and lines were put up across from wall to wall to hang clothes to dry on rainy days. The room smelled of warm wood and clean clothes. I could sprawl on the floor for hours just smelling and being warm.

This is where I took my bicycle box. I took every piece lovingly out of the box and put each one where it needed to go to make the pieces look like a bicycle. Then I took the bag of nuts and bolts and added them to my assembly line. Satisfied, I left them in the chicken shed to go in for dinner.

The next day when I went out to begin assembling my bike it was gone.

No one would talk to me about the bike. I was bereft. I looked everywhere trying to find where they had put it. Was it my brother? He surely could and would ruin my bike if he had known about it. I suffered over the loss of my bike for days.

My family was very close. My parents and we kids grew truck garden veggies, we had fruit trees and Christmas trees. We raised rabbits and sold eggs and milk. My grandparents did the same on their farm which was about eight miles away from ours. Every Sunday we had dinner at one another’s homes even if we weren’t working together on projects on one farm or another for the entire weekend.

The Sunday after my bike disappeared I was out with the dogs when my grandparents’ car came in the drive. I loved them and never ceased to be wildly excited when they came to our house. I raced for the car to greet them and after getting a pat from Grandma, saw Grandpa go to the back of the car for something. When he opened the trunk there was the dream of dreams – my bicycle. It was red. It had a basket on the front. It had handle bar grips with steamers. It had a bell!

All the rusted ubiquitously colored pieces from that box had been lovingly cleaned, primed, painted and assembled by my grandfather I don’t know who added the basket, handle grips, streamers, and bell.