Golden Moments

It was a thick winter day. A thin layer of perfectly level freshly laid snow was engraved by minute rabbit paw prints. Naked trees danced in the fierce wind, shedding any white skin from their branches. I was walking violently, my worn-out boots chiselling blisters on my feet. My mother, dressed in blue from her hat to her eyes to her snowshoes, gracefully trotted over the snow, leaving only a faint mark on the fluffy white flakes.

I, being six or seven at the time, divided my time equally between forming secret snowballs and ardently stomping along in her tracks. My mother was otherwise preoccupied and took little notice of my barrages; her blue eyes locked on an eight-year-old, hundred-pound golden retriever bounding across, side to side and up and down the snow-crested path. The excitation brimmed within me of our destination, a tranquil, pastoral pond rimmed with overhanging trees and sandy shores. Gone were the days of splashing and skipping stones in the sun, and now, caught on the winter wind were visions of ice-skating and hockey sticks on the frozen boyish ocean. We veered left off the trail, following the rabbit tracks down a small path flanked with holly bushes, their bright red berries peeking through a white crystal lattice. To me, they reassembled barb wire, to my dog, a simple inconvenience as he pranced through them in search of the constant allure of new odours.

My mother always warned me of bear traps along this path, something I could never grasp the concept of. A mechanism with the sole purpose to injure cluttering the ground of the bear’s own habitat, how is that just? While I pondered the judicial fairness of woodland safety, my mother closely watched our golden bolt across our vision, bear traps never leaving her mind.

Ultimately, we arrived at our destination. The thick fog thinned and settled, gentle mist exhaled. The murky browns around cloudy greens were replaced by white that ringed crystal blue. I'd never seen the pond that shade of beautiful before. The water matched the frozen sky that watched over the travelling trio. Eagerly, my dog pranced over the snow and onto the ice. With eyes full of envy and feet weighed down by snow and blisters, I watched. The crisp flavour of pine wafted about us and the wind picked up. As the pads of his feed must have been covered with snow, he was unable to gain any traction and our dog slid farther than I imagine he’d wished from the shore. As gallantly as he originally pounced onto the ice, his canine facial features now contorted in fear and unsteadiness. He slowed himself and attempted to turn around.

Suddenly, a bang filled the air and a crack appeared. Unbeknownst to me, his hindquarters were plunged in the frigid water and his front paws clinging desperately to any other grip he could get on the ice. “MURPHY!" my mother called "COME BACK!" She dove into action. Bravely crawling across the frozen tundra, she commenced her mission to rescue a big scaredy-dog. When retelling times of great distress, it’s commonplace to hear inquiries such as ‘What was going through your mind?’. I believe the call for action for many and that day for my mom was love. Love trumps any logic of strategic risk analysis and bypasses personal fears, for if any thought was racing through my mother’s mind at the time, it was simply ‘I must save this dog that I love.’ I stood there watching my mother, semi-oblivious of what was transpiring. My tongue, collecting thousands of white flakes was extended as much as her arms. Sprawled across the ice and holding the tightest grip a mitten can give, she reached a stick towards his mouth. Upon seeing her so close, Murphy reached for the stick but must have felt a warmth in the space between them as he lifted himself up and rested one of his back legs on the ice. ‘Just like that Murph, keep going!’ my mother encouraged. With his teeth now ensnared around the stick, she pulled him up and across the surface. Engrossed and entranced in the events, I let out a cheer as they both stepped foot on the white sanctuary of the shore.

With the return trip home lost to deep annals of memory, the sweet smell of hot cocoa is the next thing I can remember. After stripping off our winter layers, I was greeted by a mug full of mini marshmallows bouncing in cacao. I only got marshmallows on special occasions. Murphy laid by the fire and my mother sat across from me at the table.

Poisoned by the experience, Murphy never did venture very close to the pond every winter after that. My mother, I imagine, was quite pleased with his decision. Within me, I felt something actualized. A concept I had only known from television and movies and a word that fell on naive ears before then was concreted in my conscious. I had seen firsthand an actual hero. One that bravely conquered a calamity that was no match for her bravery and love. Now, never an abstract concept to me, when hearing the word ‘hero’, an image of mother is always there to accompany it.