The Experience of Falling

I inhaled the cool crisp air and watched as my breath formed a visible cloud in front of me when I exhaled. I stood at the edge of a pond I was once very familiar with, my toes barely extending onto the space where the ground became ice. The trees surrounding the pond were eerie but beautiful, with every individual twig covered in a thin layer of white frost. I looked down at the ice skates that hung from my gloved hand by the laces. I had just gotten them at a thrift store in the town nearby, after staring at this pond off and on for days wondering what it would feel like to stand on it as I had done so many times as a child. It had been years since I had been back to the farm I grew up on. I had meant to come more often, but it seemed like life always had a way of throwing something more pressing into my path. There was always a good reason why I couldn’t take the time to drive out to see my father, but none of them seemed quite good enough when I had received the call that he had passed just a few days ago.

My father was a small-town farmer, which meant he worked constantly but we were never a well-off family. He always worked long hours, but after my mother’s death, he seemed to do very little else. I was eleven when she died, just three months between her diagnosis and when the cancer finally took her life. As a child, I couldn’t understand how it had happened so quickly – it seemed unfair, and I was angry. As an adult, I could see the benefits of something terminal being quick – it became clear which would have been more painful to witness. After her death, I spent a lot of my time at home alone. When I wasn’t in school, I would pass my days reading books and playing with our old sheepdog. I would see my father in the evenings for dinner, after which I would take a bath or go for a walk around the property and he would read the paper and fall asleep on his recliner. In winter, my father wasn’t quite as busy with his work. He used the cold months to do repairs around the property, painting this or fixing that. Our large property had acres upon acres of trees, so he made money cutting firewood to sell in town and selling Christmas trees in December, but he had a little more time to spend with me in the winter months. One of the only memories I had of quality time together was ice skating on the little pond near our farmhouse.

My father had downsized the farm considerably after I had grown up and moved to the city. He grew enough food to feed himself and made just enough money to keep the lights on in the house, but it was far from being considered a business anymore. But he was just as stubborn in his sixties as he had been my entire life and absolutely refused to sell the farm and move to the city to live with me. The animals we had once kept were all gone and most of the fields we once planted with vegetables were empty, but the little pond still froze solid every winter. I sat on a large rock and removed my boots, pushing my feet into my new old skates and fastening them. I remembered the excitement I felt as a child stepping onto the ice and gliding with ease toward the center of the pond. With my skates laced tightly, I stepped onto the ice and my legs took on a mind of their own, both going in directions I had no intention of moving in. I felt like a newborn deer wobbling my way through my first steps. I flailed my arms, frantically attempting to maintain at least some balance as I tried to remember a skill I had mastered as a child. My efforts were useless, and I felt my tailbone hit the ice with a hard thud as I inevitably fell. I cursed and sat on the cold ice for a moment and thought about how sore I knew I would be the next day. I didn’t remember it hurting so badly to fall as a child. I had fallen again and again when I was young, but I only remembered getting back up and skating off once again, laughing at the excitement of having fallen. People are less fragile in childhood – their mishaps less likely to leave a bruise. Their wounds seem to heal faster – whether of the body, mind, or spirit.

I got up and attempted to skate once again, still quite unsteady on my feet but determined for the muscle memory of my childhood to kick in. I fell a few more times, but eventually began gliding around the pond easily as I had once done, despite the soreness already creeping into my legs and back. My father would typically take me skating in the early mornings, and I remembered watching the sun creep up over the treetops as we circled the pond. It was evening now, and instead of watching the rising sun, I watched it slowly descending out of sight behind those same trees. I couldn’t help but to feel guilty gliding all around the pond as the evening settled into night, there was still so much to do. I had gotten my father cremated but I had scheduled a memorial service in town the following day. I hadn’t decided what to do about the property yet. I had no use for the amount of land we still owned, but I couldn’t help but feel a hard ball form in my stomach at the thought of selling it to a stranger. As a child, I had skated around the pond for hours, not content to leave until every inch of the glassy surface was covered in lines and circles. I didn’t worry about obligations I had elsewhere, or think about the issues I would face in another time or place. At some point in life, we lose the natural ability to be entirely present. There is a shift that happens that keeps part of our minds ever wandering to another place, whether it’s a mistake we dwell on, or a task we have yet to tackle, or a consequence that may or may not come to be. As adults, we lose our ability to let go of the outcome and instead revel in the experience.

I glided to the edge of the pond and sat on the same rock to remove the skates. I slowly got to my feet and walked back to the farmhouse, taking a long hot bath to help heal the ache my body felt in attempting to relive my childhood. I slept better that night than I had in a long time. When I awoke, it was later than I usually slept, and I had to hurry to make it into town in time for the memorial service. I was surprised at how many people seemed to know my father, people that I had no recollection of as a child, but all seemed genuinely sad to hear of his passing and offered their condolences. There was one familiar face I kept noticing in the crowd, and I was surprised to learn that it was a boy I had attended school with as a child, who had since grown into a tall handsome man with a kind smile. He had once lived on the farm closest to ours, but when we were teenagers, his parents had sold their farm and moved away. I had not seen him since. Clinging to his arm was a little girl who looked to be around eight or nine, looking curiously at me as she twirled her long brown curls in her fingers. He told me this was his daughter and they had just moved back to the area. He wanted her to grow up where he once had, and they were currently renting a small apartment until he could afford something better. We talked a while longer and exchanged numbers in case we wanted to meet for coffee once more before I headed back to the city in the next few days. The memorial service ended and I packed up the flowers and cards and carried it all back to the farmhouse.

I sat on the front porch for a long time that evening. I felt the cool air as it tickled my throat and filled my lungs as I breathed in perfect harmony with the trees rustling in the wind. For the first time in a long time, I tried very hard not to think about yesterday or tomorrow, only where I sat in that very moment. After a while, I felt a deep sense of clarity that I had been longing for since I arrived at the farmhouse a few days prior. I went back inside the house, the warmth from the burning fireplace sending pins and needles into my fingers and cheeks, which had been numbed by the cold winter air. I pulled the crinkled piece of paper from my pocket and slowly dialed the numbers scribbled on it. When the man with the kind smile answered the phone, I offered for him to rent my father’s property for whatever price he could afford at the time. He was overjoyed and excitedly accepted my offer, chattering about how happy his daughter would be. As I hung up the phone, I felt relief in knowing that my father would be pleased that the farm would be lived on and cared for.

I had one more thing I knew I needed to do before I could return to my life in the city. I grabbed the old skates and the box I had been keeping on the mantle and made my way down to the little frozen pond. I sat on the rock and strapped on the skates, holding the box carefully between my hands as I wobbled onto the ice. I made it to the center of the pond and placed the box onto the ice in front of me, delicately pulling the bag containing my father’s ashes from the box. I opened the bag slightly and began to skate around the pond as I had done the night before, the ashes drifting onto the breeze behind me. I remembered all the crisp mornings we had spent together gliding around the pond, thinking not of the future or the past, but only of the way the air felt on our faces and the sounds of the trees around us. I wanted him to rest at peace in the memory of those moments, forever a part of the place he loved so much he refused to ever leave it. As the last remnants of the bag emptied onto the wind, I skated back to where the empty box still sat on the ice. As I leaned down to pick up the box, my legs slid out from underneath me and I landed hard on the ice. Though I felt the sting of the impact, a laugh escaped me and I sat on the cold ice with a smile on my face. I knew my body would not rebound as quickly as it did as a child, and I would surely have the bruises that showed my age for a while to come, but I laughed because in that moment I remembered how to enjoy the present. Though the fall would bring pain and I would need to heal, I still laughed at the excitement found in the experience of falling.