I turned the key in unit 118 and rolled up the door, my heart pounding, and the light fell on a workshop full of gleaming metal and rubber, and in the center of it, a strange and wonderful contraption: a bicycle, but not an ordinary one, built with special supports and hand pedals and a high seat with straps.
I stood in that doorway, puzzled, until I saw the photographs on the wall: Harold, a young girl in a wheelchair, and this very bicycle taking shape.
The little one the desk girl mentioned was a neighborhood girl named Grace who could not walk, and Harold had been secretly designing and building her a special adaptive bicycle, one she could ride with her hands and her strength, so that a child who had never known the freedom of riding a bike could finally feel the wind.
Harolds letter told me everything. He wrote: Old girl, there is a little girl three streets over, Grace, in a wheelchair since birth, who told me once she wished more than anything she could ride a bike like the other kids. Well, I was a machinist forty years. I figured I could build her one. It took me two years of Saturdays, and Grace came and helped me plan every part, so it would be truly hers. It is nearly done. Please, if I could not finish, find a good welder to complete it, and give Grace her wings. Every child deserves to feel the wind in their face.
I wept in that workshop over the bicycle my husband built so a little girl could fly.
Him and the little one. My Harold had spent two years of Saturdays giving a child the one freedom everyone told her she could never have.
I found Grace, and her grateful, tearful parents, who had known a kind old man was building their daughter something special but never knew the whole of it. Grace was devastated to lose Harold, her friend, her champion.
I had one of Harolds old machinist friends finish the bicycle exactly to his plans. And on a bright Saturday, we brought it to Grace.
She got in it, strapped in, gripped the hand pedals, and she rode. Down her street, hair streaming, laughing and crying at once, a child feeling the wind in her face for the first time in her life.
There was not a dry eye on that street. Harolds gift, rolling free at last.
Grace rides every day now. And her family and I have started raising money to build more of Harolds bicycles for other children who cannot walk, so his gift keeps rolling.
My daughter still did not know why her father spent Saturdays away. Now she knows he was building wings for a little girl who could not walk. Him and the little one. He gave Grace the wind. Now we are giving it to other children too. My Harold built freedom with his own two hands. I am so proud I could fly myself.