Welcome back to The Lemonade Stand for the 9th in our summer series on using whatever ingredients you have — the sour or the salty, the savory or the sweet — to find beauty in life. The winner of last week's giveaway copy of The Deconstruction of Christianity is Lynn C of Greenville, SC.
Did you have plans this summer--large or small-- that went AWOL?
Maybe it was a long-awaited getaway that had to be cancelled, or a job that seemed like a sure thing until it surely went to someone else. Maybe the family reunion didn’t come together or the check never came or the kids didn’t come either.
It’s nearly August. Is it too late to embrace the season and hope she’ll hug you back, just a little? Is there still time for Summer to sweeten things up a bit? Is there something you’d love to do if it wasn’t too costly or distant or risky?
Strapped into their bathing suits and car seats, the grandchildren visiting from New Jersey wriggled with anticipation.
“Sliding Rock! We’re finally gonna get to do Sliding Rock!”
The kids had visited their grandparents often in the years they’d lived in western North Carolina, but they were never quite big enough to experience one of the region’s most famed natural wonders—a 60-foot-long waterfall deep in Pisgah National Forest that cascades over gently sloping rocks and plunges the swimmer into a large, deep pool at the bottom. (It’s safer than it sounds. Or so they say.)
Wedged into the daughter’s minivan, the family reached the site after over an hour’s drive along twisty mountain roads only to find apologetic Forest Service staff turning cars away. The parking lot was full, and cars were parked along Highway 276 as far as they could see.
Dagnabbit, it’s summertime in the Smokies, tourist season at its most frenzied. There'd be no sliding that day for them.
Disappointed, the family pulled into Whole Hawg up the road for ‘cue and hush puppies while they reconnoitered. They had promised the kids an afternoon of water play.
What could be done to redeem the day?
Then a memory surfaced of a longtime resident’s mention of a special spot somewhere in the forest—a shallow, fast-moving river for wading, a low cliff above a deep pool for plunging, and a rope with branch handles for swinging.
“We keep it secret from the tourists, but if ya live here long enough, I jest might tell ya where ‘tis,” he’d said with a wink.
A phone call pleading their case produced the location, and minutes later the kids were out of the car, crossing a stream and running to a river hidden from the road.
The setting was everything the friend had described. The two oldest kids gleefully rode the current. The grandfather waded in the shallows hand-in-hand with the youngest.
And the grandmother? Thankful her husband had thrown a camp chair in the back of the van, she settled on a sandy spit of land to watch. Those algae-covered rocks looked slick, and the water was flowing fast. The kids were moving downstream to the rope swing on the opposite shore. She was in her 70’s now. If she got in there with them, she might slip and crack a knee or break a hip.
But then she might not, either. Possibility is not probability. But what was certain was that the kids were having the time of their lives while she was sitting on the shore.
How about you? Is there something you could do in these final weeks of summer that you’ve been hesitant to try?
Life is slippery. Like time itself, it wriggles eel-like out of our hands when we’re being cautious, playing it safe.
Or not playing at all.
So that July afternoon in the cool reaches of Pisgah Forest?
The children shrieked with joy, their cries echoing in the trees.
The grandfather, a strong swimmer, waded after them, keeping careful watch.
And the grandmother, She-Who-Plays-It-Safe? The children’s memories of this sunny afternoon in the Smokies would not include her if she stayed snugly on the shore.
The summers of our lives flow like water through fingers. The person we planned to spend our days with might be gone, the funds we thought we’d have already spent. The place we hoped to park our future closed to us.
Sometimes life rejects the plans we make.
But that rejection? It’s also redirection—a resolute turning to an alternate way of thinking, living, being. It’s realizing that the Bad Stuff that could possibly happen very well may not, so why not bank on that probability rather than the scary possibilities?
The children played in the mountain stream that day until they trembled with cold. Towel-wrapped and sandy-haired, they trudged back to the van and tumbled in, the littlest with her fingers laced through her grandmother’s.
“We had the funnest time today, didn’t we?” she sighed. “And you got in and played with us, too, and you weren’t even afraid.”
The older woman had been, just a bit. But the little one was right.
We sure did have the funnest time that day.
- Maggie Wallem Rowe
Maggie Wallem Rowe is a dramatist and speaker who writes from Peace Ridge, her home in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. The author of This Life We Share and Life is Sweet, Y'all, Maggie is working up her courage to try Sliding Rock herself one day. Maybe when she gets older and a bit braver, like her grandkids.