Letter: There’ll Be Mountains

“What did you like best about your first ever hike?” I asked my five year old granddaughter when we returned home last evening from her two-and-a-half miler.

I was quite surprised at her answer.

She did not mention the river at all, though she had taken off her shoes and spent more time in the water than eating her lunch.

She did like the log crossing over the river below which alligators lurked, at least according to grandpa.

But even that was second.

What she liked best was when the trail climbed.

“Woah, grandpa! Look at that!”

From her position in the lead – and she led throughout – she would point up at the steep pitch that loomed ahead.

She called them mountains, and I suppose to someone just three-and-a-half feet tall, they were mountains indeed.

“Do you think we can make it?” I would reply each time.

“Oh, yah,” sometimes she would answer, sometimes just forging ahead, waiting for me at the top where the path leveled out again.

We paused at a tree where the mushrooms, or fungi, appeared to be weeping. Tiny droplets of water had formed but not because it was raining. No, this was a beautiful warm afternoon in the forest.

One explanation suggested the droplets had a special relationship with honey bees and that the ‘tears’ were a sweet food and medicine for the bees, attracting the bees and so distributing the spores.

I think more accurate is that the conks were releasing water pressure.

But as I sit here writing this, both explanations describe the special relationship between my granddaughter and me.

So sweet to be with.

And so many tears – tears that serve to release pressure – that she, so young, does not yet understand but which, for her grandfather, so missing her grandmother, have been brushed away often even as they form on beautiful warm afternoons in the forest.

Then it was off up the trail.

“Woah, grandpa! Look at that!”

“Do you think we can make it?”

And up she’d go.

And as I watched her go – her little pal tucked into her backpack, a backpack she wore because grandpa wore one – my thought was, ‘Oh dear little one. There’ll be rivers to cross and there’ll be mountains to climb. And there will be tears. And though I won’t be there, you won’t go alone. I haven’t gone alone. You won’t either.

‘You’ll make it.’