Behind the wheel, staring out at the long, flat landscape, with Garth Brooks blaring on the radio and the dash slick with Armor All, Texas sun shining through the windshield, I felt a new sense of freedom. But this freedom wasn’t what I’d felt as a little girl on my banana-seat bike; the definition had changed. Back then, freedom was a kind of abandon—wild, reckless, unselfconscious. Now I felt free when I could control every detail, from the temperature to the song on the stereo to where I would go next.
