Today I told the kids that I needed an hour's worth of Concentration-with-a-capital-C, in which I could get week 2 of my online summer class all ready to roll, and then we went out for a picnic afterward. We pulled up to the park just as a bunch of kids from our parish school showed up, and after Stella finished her lunch she ran off to play with a friend.
Except...then she disappeared. I wasn't worried at first, because there's a lot of tall equipment at this park and there were a lot of kids running around. But after a bit I said to Petely, "I'm going to find Stella. Can you stay with our things?"
She wasn't climbing the trees on the south edge of the playground. She wasn't splashing in the little creek. I thought maybe I should run back to the shelter where the school kids had their drinks and snacks set up, but something nudged me to keep going further away from the playground. I called her name. No answer. I kept calling, thinking, "She can't possibly have come this far," and there was still no answer. But when I stopped calling, I heard crying.
The reason I couldn't see her and the reason she couldn't hear me were the same reason: she had climbed a tree -- a colossal pine tree with lovely tempting closely-spaced branches -- and wound up terrified on a high branch, too fearful to move.
You guys, she was more than 25 feet up.
In the moment I was the calmest briskest most confident version of myself. "You are going to be OKAY, darling," I called up with utter conviction. "Take a deep breath and say a Hail Mary!" [pausing for a sec here to swallow back some tears, because the certainty that infused my voice was not entirely warranted under the circumstances] I didn't quite know what to do, though. My tree-climbing skills are not what they used to be, and I was worried that I might make the situation worse if I went after her -- getting stuck myself, or blocking the path downward, or something. I tried to talk her through it, but that didn't work very well ("try that branch! no, sweetie, the one pointing east!" --not so helpful, Mom). And she was so scared. I talked her over to a spot where two branches formed a V she could sit on, and told her I was going to get Pete, the current tree-climbing champ in our family, to help her out.
I pelted back to our picnic table, directing some very emphatic petitions to her guardian angel as I went, and sent Pete running to her tree. When I saw him in action I was really grateful I hadn't tried to go after her myself-- he seemed stuck only a third of the way up, and he was on the opposite side of the trunk unable to see how to help.
Somehow I was still entirely calm. "You don't have to be afraid, sweetheart," I yelled up at her. "You can absolutely do this. I am going to take you and Pete out for ice cream after you get down, and we are going to sit together at our table and laugh about this."
Slowly at first, and then faster, she found a path back down. I want to remember the way it felt to hug her when she was back on the ground: the smell of sun-warmed hair and the stickiness of sap-splotched hands and the RELIEF, the towering staggering RELIEF that she had not fallen from 25 feet.
"That was really hard, Stella," said Pete. "How'd you do it?"
"When Mom said we would go for ice cream," she told him, "I decided I could do it."
We have agreed that tree-climbing is an activity that requires a buddy.
This is the same park where Pete concussed himself six years ago. Maybe...we need a different park.
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