Of Sledding, Love, and Perspective

I have studied these blooms who publish the fact that nothing is tentative about love, have applauded their willingness to take love's ultimate risk of being misapprehended.

Mona Van Duyn, from A Bouquet of Zinnias

We had another good snow here Friday night into Saturday morning. Today was warm--for Minnesota in January anyway--with a bright blue sky, so late afternoon found Julie and Joe at the sledding hill. Frankly, Fans, it's more like a luge, but that makes it just that much more fun for those who love to sled and Our Hero loves to sled.

A dad who was there with his two nine-year-old twin daughters struck up a conversation with Julie while they hung out at the top of the hill. This dad was impressed with Joe's way with all of it--how he just takes off down the hill, how he trudges back up with his sled, and plunges back down--all without crying or whining about the inevitable spills and slips, and the cold, especially when the dad learned that Joe was five-and-a-half.

Of course, he'd left by the time Joe lost his grip on his sled's rope near the top of the hill, and refused--crying--to go and collect the sled from where it had slid, petulantly telling Juile she as being unfair when she refused to get it. (Our Hero did eventually go get it after he saw an older girl lose her grip on her tube, and then trundle back down the hill to retrieve it. Joe log rolled down and briefly decided that might be more fun than sledding.)

It all set Julie to thinking how hard it can be to apprehend another in all his or her fullness, and how love can make it that much more difficult to do so.  Because love can both cloud and magnify strengths, as well as flaws, in a way that is especially challenging for a parent loving a child who is unfolding.  Some of a child's qualities will be immutable while others are byproducts of an age or stage that will pass all too soon--or not soon enough--and love will make one celebrate some and excuse others, all the while muddling perspective as to which is which. So it is that "He's five!" can be an expression of warranted (and unwarranted) wonder and celebration, and of warranted (and unwarranted) exasperation and excuse.

The trick seems to be not letting the wonder obscure the exasperation, and vice versa, but it's a tricky trick indeed when love can so easily cause such misapprehension, and can itself be so easily be misapprehended.

So there was love today: there, flying down a hill on a silver sled; there, watching from the top of the hill; there, still the top of the hill, not making its way toward a runaway sled; there, log rolling down the same hill after the same sled; and there, walking home in the setting sun, sometimes side by side, sometimes hand in hand.