The World at Hand

It was warmer this morning than it has been for the past few mornings – the thermometer nudging a balmy 10 degrees above zero – and Rye was up and out before it was fully light. The boy has caught the “fever,” which is the preferred colloquialism for the affliction that strikes a certain subset of the population preparing to spend the next three or four weeks engaged in the blood letting of sugar maples. For the past month, he has been amassing a pile of slabwood scraps off the sawmill, and yesterday he arranged a small stone firepit, over which he intends to boil away the 39 or so parts of water it will take to make 1 part of syrup. Concerned that Fin might beat him to the more productive trees before he got a chance to have at them, Rye marked his territory with strands of yarn. It looked as if the trees wore necklaces around their trunks. The other day, while he and Penny were driving home from his banjo lesson, Penny mentioned that there were times she still wished to travel – the girl can’t quite rinse herself of the last few strands of wanderlust woven into her DNA - and Rye said sure, he’d be fine with that, so long as we were home for his two favorite times of year: Sugarin’ and haying. Attaboy.

I don’t really believe in having dreams for my children, if only because it seems unfair to burden them with the weight of whatever hopes and expectations I might harbor on their behalf. Oh sure, I wish for them to be healthy and happy, although to be perfectly honest, there are times I’m not sure even this is appropriate, if only because I sometimes wonder if a full appreciation of their lives and the world around them might neccesitate a broader range of experience than simple health and happiness (this is not a fully formed opinion on my part, and I reserve the right to live out my days being nothing less than a cheerleader for their unreserved physical vigor and excellent spirits).

But despite all this, despite trying – sometimes rather desperately – to escape the trap created by the sense that my emotional wellbeing is somehow dependent on any particular outcome relating to my children, I can’t help but divine a certain satisfaction from these moments. I look up, out the window above the kitchen sink, the stars still just visible in the brightening sky, and I see Rye tromping through the snow, laden with the implements of tapping, the remedy for his fever: A cordless drill, a hammer, a small bucketful of taps. Or I see Fin, bent over his trapper’s education manual, penciling in answers to the often-inane questions put forth (What clothing will you wear while trapping? We had a good howl over that one, let me tell you) his hatchet and belt knife on the table beside him, and I feel that unique sense of peace that comes from having witnessed your child immersed in something so deeply important to them that their world has folded in on itself.

It occurs to me that while we are socialized to the belief that our children’s lives should be constantly expanding into new horizons and opportunities, could it be that we are ignoring (or simply ignorant of) the value in having their world contract? In short, what of providing them the freedom to immerse themselves in the small experiences of the world at hand, rather than constantly distracting them with the possibilities of the world at large?

This, then, is the dream I can’t kick, and I freely admit it’s a selfish one: Our boys will not chase the infinite possibilities of the world at large, but instead will continue to find fulfillment in the world at hand.