Out walking this morning, Rascal and I found ourselves for a while behind a dad with two young daughters, one daughter on each side. Suddenly, Dad started to run. Not very fast. The girls hustled to catch up. Then they started to giggle. Daddy had turned around and started skipping. They skipped, too. “What are we doing, Daddy?” the girls wanted to know. “This!” Daddy replied, and started hopping on one foot. So they all hopped, laughing in earnest now. As the trio turned around again and headed off, they were taking very slow steps with knees raised very high. The little girls may or may not remember that walk with Daddy in years to come, but they will remember the fun they had together.
Our dad took us on a memorable walk one winter’s night when we were little. We bundled up and went out in the snow with Daddy, walking around the neighborhood, in the middle of the road, in the darkness. It was very quiet, almost like church. We didn’t see anyone else. No cars were out. It was just us, together, walking in the snow with Daddy. We remember it still.
Our friend Pat has memories of a walk in the deep Vermont snow with her husband and their three boys. “The boys were pelting each other with snowballs, and Justin got me a good one,” she recalls. Pat, who confesses she couldn’t hit anything smaller than a pine tree,” returned fire in vain. “You have to stand still,” she told her gleeful child. “Like that,” she said. “Now back up.” She kept backing him up till he was standing under a snow-laden pine. Then she let fly with a snowball, right into the pine. Which dumped snow all over the boy. Who found it as funny as the rest of the family did. They all remember that walk in the snow.
While Pat and I were chatting, she reminded me of another vignette. Our last dog, Lindy, was a sweetheart, a rescue who found and created joy in life. She occupied a special place not just in our hearts, but in Pat’s. She remembers how Lindy would run as fast as she could to get to Pat’s door when we came to visit, and how Lindy did the happy dance whenever she saw Pat. To use Pat’s words, we are enriched by “these little tender moments.”
For one of our daughters, it isn’t a particular memory that stands out, but cumulative experience. She remembers the family hikes, just about every weekend. “And bagels!” she adds. “We always had bagels when we got back.” She took her own children on similar hikes as they grew up. “Up the North Fork and in Yellowstone, cross-country skiing and on snowshoes.” She and her husband raised their family in Wyoming, a fabulous place although, at least at the time, bagels were hard to come by.
Our friend Anne remembers that, when she was six or seven, she and her parents went skating on the river. It was fun just to be outside under the blue New Hampshire sky, and it was her first time skating on a river. “Parents, or maybe other kids, had swept the snow from the river, and the ice was a little bumpy, not smooth and boring like a lake,” she recalls. “For some reason, I was thinking about that, today.”
My sister-in-law Barbara laughs when she remembers her family’s winter ritual—“making Dad take back the tree he got from the Kiwanis lot.” He volunteered there at Christmas, and he’d bring home a specimen they probably couldn’t sell because it was skinny or misshapen. “Then Peggy, Mary, Mom, and I would get in the car and go back with him to trade it for a good one,” she says. This practice in looking for the right shape stood her in good stead when she had children of her own. “We’d take the kids skiing in the mountains. There’s always a hill with just the right slope if you look for it. They’d play for hours.”
Barbara also smiles when she remembers skating with her sister Mary on their neighbors’ rink when the girls were quite young. “We wore our little red skorts and black tights,” Barbara says. “How did you stay warm in skorts?” I wonder. “Oh, we didn’t worry about staying warm,” she says. “We were just so cute.”
Whether we bring them consciously to mind, or they present themselves unbidden, our memories of little tender moments past can warm us down the years. The young girls Rascal and I saw today don’t know that yet, but it’s entirely possible their father does.
31 December 2021