Page 34 of Forever Christmas
I point out the upper face. “If we head that way, we might be able to get to the top of the short side. It’s not the highest peak, but it’s something.”
“A top is a top,” she says.
We move forward, the terrain growing increasingly difficult. We should’ve worn gloves. My palms and fingertipsget rough and sore. But June doesn’t complain.
Up and up we scale the side. Sometimes I have to jump on a large rock and turn to pull June up. We don’t talk about anything more than the immediate situation —left or right? Is that rock too big? Watch out for that hole.
I learn more about her than if I had talked to her at home. She’s tough. She’s smart. She analyzes situations well. She plansahead. And most of all, she sticks with something even when it’s hard.
The wind starts rushing at us. The air feels different.
“We’re getting close!” I say.
And we are. It’s a fight to make it up the last part, as scrub brush and crumbling rocks threaten most every path. But then we clamor over a particularly tricky spot and there it is.
The top.
Even my meager hair gets tossed every direction.June’s ponytail whips away from her head.
It’s perfectly warm and perfectly cool, all at the same time. It feels as though we’re in the vortex of a storm, the air spinning as if it doesn’t know which way to blow.
“Wow,” June says. It’s hard to come up with words to describe how it feels.
The desert stretches out far beyond the foothills. The roads are tiny ribbons eventually disappearing intothe dust.
We sit down, and once again, we don’t need to talk about anything at all. Everything we might want to say is all laid out in front of us. How hard a road we’ve traveled. How terrible a place we just left behind, Dad in the hospital and finding it hard to care one way or the other.
But the flip side is just as clear. The unbroken beauty of the sky. The wildness of the wind, unchanneledand blowing free.
For this moment, we see exactly how beautiful it can be to push through the hardship and reach the top.
