Up at the top of the tubing hill Saturday, the air is warm and a little windy. A mass of people–little girls in snow pants and stocking caps, dads in beards and ski jackets, moms and toddlers and a couple of teens–wait in line at the bottom, to be towed up on their tubes by the motorized pulley rope. At the top, the smooth white lanes of snow, slick and wet and speedy smooth, the attendants waiting to grab your boots, to ask “Straight or spin?” and send you flying on your black rubber donut toward the bottom.
A family goes down, arms linked in a circle, the littlest girl safe on her tube in their center. Their weight shoots them far to the end of the snow lane.
“Want to go down together or you want to try it by yourself this time, Gina?” I ask. She is short beside me, the height of a child, although she is forty-six and stockier than a child would be. She is bundled into her brown coat with a striped scarf worn over her thin brown braid, and, as always, thick lenses over her almond-shaped eyes.
She smiles, her wide, flat forehead wrinkling into three horizontal lines. Shrugs. “I don’t care.”
“You pick. What do you want to do?”
“Together.”
So I wait for her to sit on her tube, sit on mine in front of her and grab her boots. “Straight,” I tell the attendant. Regina tried the spin only once and decided once was enough.
This is a school outing, and my three other students, Jonny, MacKenzie, and Kaitlyn, along with my teenage sister Elizabeth and her friend Lavina, climb the wooden stairs or ride the tow rope and slide down the hill again multiple times. Regina and I are slower, in our own world. Engrossed in Regina, I lose track of the others.
“Are you having fun?” I ask her, periodically.
She always smiles. “Oh, yes. It’s much more fun than I thought it would be. I’ll tell Eugene and Joyce. They were scared I’d break my leg.”
I only hope when I am forty-six I am as much of a trooper at trying new and scary things as Regina is.
Liz and Lavina and MacKenzie abdicate to buy hot chocolate from the building at the bottom of the hill. Regina and I, wondering where everybody went, find the three of them at a picnic table on the porch, their coats off, sipping their hot chocolate, peaceful as cats on a windowsill. Jonny and Kaitlyn are still going full speed, up the hill and down again.
Gina has some hot chocolate, too. Afterwards she and I take a couple more trips down the hill, then sit on one of the straw bale boundaries at the bottom, waiting for the others.
Snow melts in puddles on the gravel. The sky is a blue circle over the hill, the clusters of people, the bare trees.
“I can write about this in my diary,” Gina says.
I put my arm around her, wave my arm toward the sky . “Will you write about the blue sky, too, Regina? You should write that in your diary.”
She nods agreeably. “And the clouds.”
We have struggled through our long Wisconsin winter, hunched beneath below-zero weather for most of February. But on this Saturday, spring is here, lithe and tawny, rippling its bunched muscles beneath the snow.
“Did you have fun, Gina?” I ask, for the tenth time.
She nods. “Yes. It was so much more fun than I thought it would be.”
With a title like that I had to read this post though I read all your posts and of course knew that you were speaking of another Gina.
Love the joy you expressed in your blue-sky outing with your loved students.
Gina
I like this piece, Luci. It’s true for all of life. It is more fun than we thought. Just depends on whether or not we are willing to take some risks.
Perkinstown?
Yes, Perkinstown. :)
Pingback: 1 Thankful Thing, 1 Helpful Thing, and 1 Thing that Made Me Angry - Lucinda J Kinsinger