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At The Center

I am walking in my neighborhood on a winter day and see a mother pulling a small child on a sled.  As they cross the street, the sled bounces down a curb and suddenly I feel the jolt and it is my mittened hands gripping the wooden frame.

Looking up, I see my father holding the rope and snow filtering through street lights.  We have come outside after dinner and everything is glittering and quiet.  As we bump down the curb, my father stops in the middle of an empty intersection.  “Hold on tight,” he says and begins to turn around and around, spinning my sled out from him in a circle of light, around and around in the feathery snow, in the glittering dark.  

When my father finally stops, I beg for one more spin.  “Hold on then,” he says and hurls me into orbit again at the end of a loop of clothes line.  I don’t know whether this happened many times or only once.  It doesn’t matter.

It is a moment of joy so alive inside me that fifty years later, I need only see a mother pulling a child on a s

led and my mittened hands hold on tight.