The beautiful bicycle is beckoning, its green metallic paint gleaming in the sunlight, as if to say with a wink and a smile, “Trust me. It will be OK.”

Will it, beguiling bicycle? It hasn’t been OK in the past. I am afraid.

With good reason. More about that later. But here I am, at midlife, ready to mount a two-wheeled steed and attempt to relearn something I was never very good at in the first place.

$55 for a gently used 15-speed mountain bike was a deal too good to pass up. It leaves enough money in my budget to buy antiseptic for scrapped knees and anodyne for sore muscles. And a helmet. Definitely a helmet. Everyone who knows me says so, so it must be true.

As a young girl, I rode a bicycle that had been cobbled from two. It was a boys’ bike. I’d like to say our family was ahead of its time and we were the original unisex bicycle pioneers, but the truth was, we were poor. Envious yet stoic, I admired my friends’ pink bicycles with spangles dangling from the handlebars and baskets adorned with big plastic daisies. Surely, I’ll be forgiven for the fib that I rode a boys’ bike because a girl could do anything a boy could do. It did, after all, turn out to be true.

The bicycle represented freedom, a way off the farm and away from my six siblings to define myself outside their shadows. But then I turned 16, and the two-wheeled mode of transportation – and by this time, especially the bike of my childhood dreams with a dorky basket with flowers and spangles on the handlebars – held no appeal. The 390 V-8 in the garage, even if it was a station wagon that seated nine comfortably, was the only way to travel. (I wrecked it about two months after getting my driver’s license, and with most of my older siblings gone from home, it was replaced by a more stylish Mercury sedan. Not that I ever got to drive it or anything. The kids’ car, a 1960 Chevy with big fins on the back and a quickly rusting undercarriage, was a little like that bicycle built from two, but it kept me mobile, and that was all that was important.)

Bicycle riding was just another childhood memory until about 20 years ago, when friends suggested I join them on a ride on a fine summer day. They had a spare, and I thought it might evoke a nice memory, no longer embarrassed by my makeshift bike, but appreciative of the innovation hardship can foster. I assumed – and within moments I knew how dangerous it is to do that – those contraptions on the handlebars were gear-shifters. No need to worry about them, because I wouldn’t be going that fast after decades of driving where I wanted to go.

Clipping along at a good speed, I hit a T-intersection. I threw the pedal back to engage the breaks. It spun around like a top. In mid-turn, I attempted to dismount, a disastrous choice that only compounded the damage to my body, my clothing and my ego. The brakes, my friends told me too late, were controlled by those gizmos on the handlebars. I should have asked more questions. Trouper that I am, I got back on the bike. When it came time to stop again, I gripped both of them with all my might. Any experienced bike rider knows what happened next. End over end, head over heels. I walked the bike home.

But I am eager to try again. One question, though. Would anyone think it strange to see a middle-aged woman using training wheels?