Change

"Dad has taken the girls to go sledding," my sister writes, and I smile. I think about our hill. To get there when it snowed we walked a carriage-road concealed by middle-aged, mostly white oaks; at the end on the left side was an old trash heap where we dug in summer with a stick for antique bottles. In layers of denim and cotton--no fancy winter clothes, just sweatpants over jeans--we spread out across that whole hill and sledded smoothly down.

Today, a "new" house (built twenty-five years ago), its winding driveway lined with evergreens, makes that impossible. And a neighbor's attempted orchard atop the hill seems to weigh it down. Is it typical to say, when I visit my parents and take a walk, that the hill no longer looks that tall?

It may be only that I have grown, my memory reshaping the land. But surely the land must shift, like one's own leanings, throughout a human life: soil loosened, slope reduced, or surface concealed by new roots.

Gravity

I walk on the surface of mostly month old snow, the trail packed so well by deer and other snowshoe-ers that I don't need to wear my own. The low angle of the January noon sun has created a taller forest on the ground than the one I walk through. I move along, eclipsing shrubs, trying to determine the hue of the shadows before me--charcoal or ash, the color of evening or morning.

When I get to the open field, absent of trees, I could be walking on some other planet's icy moon. Snow has drifted over the path, and with every other step my foot falls through.

I think of a friend in Kansas, awaiting a snowstorm, who has written me about her six-month-old: "Edison is in his Johnny Jumper and I propped up a box full of his toys next to him so he could dig them out and drop them on the floor."

"Glad to see he has discovered gravity," I will write back soon. Sometimes the world seems all push and pull: trees and toddlers growing up, me balanced on this temporary surface, but returning to the ground with every footfall. We learn to throw, jump, walk, but lest we forget where we belong, the sun presses us back to the earth in shadow.