Last November 6th was my eightieth (and final) time waterskiing in 2022 because that was the date of my ski accident. The rope broke and I fell so hard and hurt my ribs and didn’t ski again for seventeen weeks. On March 5th of this year, the weather was warm enough and I was recovered enough to ski again and the rest is history. I have skied and skied and skied since then. I have been thankful and thankful and thankful since then too. And today I hit my slalom ski goal of 100 times in a calendar year, though to be more precise, it was 100 times in eight months (March-October). I love to count things and this tally is especially significant to me because of how much I love to ski and how unsure I was if I would ever ski at full capacity again the accident last year and also because I know I won’t get to do this forever.
For a few weeks now, I have been working on my goodbyes as we begin to think about moving to the house we bought on Faris Road. And with each of these last dozen or so times I’ve skied, I’ve been acutely aware of how my life of convenient, walk-out-my-back-door-to-ski routine is reaching its conclusion. I won’t have to kiss skiing goodbye entirely because we hope to keep the lake house, but it won’t be what it has been.
I find myself always wanting to put my feelings about my mortality into words so I can live my life better, “be softer, kinder,” as Mary Oliver writes in her poem “North Country.” Yesterday I finished rereading Wendell Berry’s book How It Went, and the words I’ve been seeking were gifted to me. They are a perfect description of this feeling I have about my 100 times of skiing this year, of being aware of what I’ve had and knowing it can’t last. The book closes with Andy Catlett and his father Wheeler being mesmerized by the sight of a double rainbow over an old barn on the land they both so loved. I feel deeply just what they felt.
We understood that this would happen to us only once. It might happen again, but we would not be there together to see it. We knew that we could not remain in that beautiful light. We needed to go before it was gone, so as not to spoil it by our too much wanting. -Wendell Berry, How It Went
This must be why we don’t get to live as mortal beings forever. We can’t help our “too much wanting,” and we will never be satisfied, no matter how much beauty we take in. I could live here on the lake till the end of my days and never get enough of seeing it as smooth as glass first thing in the morning, or from my shady spot under the grapevine at midday, or by the light of a full moon at night. My eyes are so full of the lake that they brim with tears. My heart is so full of skiing that it could burst, but there is still room for a hundred and a hundred and a hundred more times to put on that same swimsuit, ski vest, gloves, and slalom ski and give TJ the go-ahead to pull me out of the water and off I glide and ski side to side, all the while looking for the great blue herons and the bald eagles that we were privileged to see many times this summer.
I owe to TJ a great debt of gratitude as he has made all my ski days possible (minus a dozen times Cash pulled me behind the jetski when TJ was out of town). I cherish those small rest breaks I would always take between sets on the slalom course when TJ and I would chat about the cloudless sky or the cows cooling off in the edge of the water or the fishing boats we saw (or didn’t). I know TJ as more than a lover, a friend, a father, a storyteller. I know him as a boat driver. A patient, kind, willing, skillful, and faithful boat driver. And he knows me as a skier. This is the one life we get together, a life in which the lake has buoyed our marriage, holding us up and together. Now we get to carry these memories with us wherever our journey leads, and though I don’t know how everything will go, how it went is that I will have skied a hundred times only once.