This I Believe: Sledding Weather

There was a long, cold wind running its hands along the tops of the trees in our back yard that day. It came from somewhere up in the now-obscured mountains, and it brought with it sledding weather. My memory now, like almost all my earliest ones, is video assisted. There’s a tape recording of flying down the back hill in my father’s lap, on the same orange sled we rode until it broke, well within reach of my own internalized memory. We flew down the hill where no beloved dogs had yet been buried, through where no garden had yet been planted, past where no shed had yet been raised nor adopted farm trucks been parked. In that home video, we flew right past my mother, who had not yet had her second child, and who had let the camcorder fall at an angle as she trudged, laughing, through fresh snow towards our stopping place, well into the alley that marked the end of our lot. There had been no fences between where we began our descent and here. The back yard was a simple place then, indicative of a young family with plenty of room to grow. Over the next two decades, fences grew to surround gardens, and grew again to keep the deer out. Sapling apple trees were planted to entice those same deer elsewhere in the yard, as even the tallest fence didn’t seem to hinder them. A shed appeared, and was soon filled with all manner of a transplanted Vermonter’s ‘things.’ Horse trailers found space to reside, as did a wide variety of vehicles. The back yard grew a potent personality over two decades, and sledding moved to the long downhill alley paralleling the lot. The wind still blew the same each winter, long and cold, but the world it blew over grew to look different. The trees still stood the same, but the world beneath them became full of signs of life.

Much the same can be said for my understanding of nature. It has always been the same, at its core. I was raised with so much love for everything, especially things of natural beauty. But as I’ve aged over those two decades, my understanding and relationship has deepened and evolved, from an outsider’s admiration to a participant’s affection. I wasn’t there to see the snow falling on the hill in the back yard this winter, or hear the wind running its hands along the tops of the trees. But I still saw snow, and I felt warm. I still heard wind, and my eyes teared up from the beauty of its song. The thing about nature is that it doesn’t really change over a human lifetime (at least we can hope it doesn’t), and it certainly doesn’t change to fit one human’s idea of it. We change to fit it, and possibly the greatest peace a person can achieve is finding their own place in nature––fitting into the greatest puzzle of all, as comfortably as a child’s foot into a first pair of winter boots.