Sledding With Margaret

First, we walked the sloping hill in snowshoes to tamp down the new snow and make a path for the sleds.  Margaret has been sledding this hill behind her house for forty years.  She knows where the woodchuck holes are and where the brambles grow.

Then we each sat in our plastic sleds and gave ourselves the push that got us going.

It didn’t take me long to veer off my path right into Margaret.  Fortunately, we were still going slow and the soft snow buffered the blow.  Margaret kept her course and I swerved off in my own direction plowing through the fresh snow.

It was a great day for sledding, a deep blue sky with lots of bright sunshine and just cold enough that the walk back up the hill keep us warm.

The sledding kept our conversation light and made it easy to laugh.   I’m not sure why moving fast down a hill on a piece of plastic is so much fun.  It’s a release of some kind, a letting go.

I suppose I could sled down the hill in the pasture behind the barn.  But I’ve never thought of doing that till now. I don’t know if sledding alone is fun. I’ve never tried it.  I actually hadn’t thought about sledding in years, until Margaret invited me to go with her last winter.

It seems significant to me that I rediscovered the joy of sledding not from a child but from a woman almost 20 years older than me. As I edge closer to 60 years old, I do think more of the things I will one day no longer be able to do.  Yet here’s Margaret reminding me not to give up the things I don’t have to in preparation for a future I can not know.

I like looking at our tracks in the snow and thinking about how unpredictable they were.  How we only had so much control over where we would go and never ended up where we thought we would.