LIVERMORE FALLS – Rose Rivers pushed her bicycle along the muddy entrance to the skate park off Foundry Road Wednesday as she looked for empty bottles.

The 77-year-old Livermore Falls woman, who doesn’t drive, is a familiar sight in the warmer months as she rides her bike from her home on Highland Avenue to Hannaford in Jay.

“I collect empty bottles if I see them. A lot of people get there ahead of me,” Rivers said Wednesday. Her bottle booty was low this day.

She had taken Foundry Road and found a section of it, and the road leading to the skate park behind the town office, to be muddy.

Though she rode the bike down, she pushed it up the dirt road on the way out.

“I lean on the bike and rest as I’m walking up the hill,” she said.

Rivers remembers exactly when she learned to ride a bicycle.

“When I was 9, I snuck my sister’s bicycle out and she gave me a scolding when she found out,” Rivers said. “That’s how I learned. I was all excited I could ride a bicycle.”

Her sister wasn’t thrilled, she said, that she had taken her bike.

“I didn’t care. I learned to ride a bike,” Rivers said.

The bike she rides now is an old-fashioned woman’s bike with no gears.

“I can’t drive a car. When I was 17 I tried to learn but went into a ditch.”

She tried again in her 20s, she said, but ended up backing a relative’s vehicle into a tree.

“I said the heck with it, I’ll be a hazard to the road,” she said.

Now she gets around by riding her bike and relatives driving her to do errands, if she can’t use her two-wheeler.

“I don’t ride every day,” she said. “I usually don’t ride when snow is on the ground but I was getting sick of it. It’s supposed to be spring.”