Live Free: A Little Trouble is Good for You

Jill Armstrong shares a story that her grandmother tells time and time again

My grandmother tells this story every time the family gathers: 

As a 6-year-old, I despised cross-country skiing. Yet, my grandmother still dragged me along each time she made the 10-minute journey to White Farm, a historic and sprawling property in Concord.

Each outing, I’d struggle to stuff my feet into the stiff leather boots that resembled gray bricks or snap the block toe into the binding of my little white skis. 

But soon enough, with the aid of my grandmother, we’d be off exploring the expansive trail system, skating across open fields before ducking into bordering forests, the pine boughs often sagging under the weight of snow. 

I tried to mimic my grandmother’s movements, a weightless glide over the packed surface — right, left, right, left. But my little limbs struggled to find any rhythm at all, usually ending in a faceplant or upside-down with my skis overhead, one ski parallel to the ground, while one tip seemed inevitably to find itself trapped in the hardened snowpack. 

I spent the majority of each trip moaning and crying, proclaiming how unfair it was that she, my grandmother, never once fell. She knew everything, it seemed. She could do anything, it seemed! Why was life so unfair?

It often didn’t take long for her to threaten me — “Why don’t you walk back to the car, then?” — before I’d stop my whining and reluctantly continue on behind her in silence, lips pouted and eyes locked on her back in a permanent death stare. 

It wasn’t until I first saw her stumble that I had a change of heart. 

On one outing, as we approached the final hill before the parking lot, she lost her footing and slipped off the trail, her skis tangled in a notorious “pricker” bush. It was then that I started to laugh, not in a menacing way, but a hearty burst, deep from the belly, causing her to laugh as well. 

After our initial reactions, I put my little gloved hands on my hips, puffed out my chest and hollered down to her this line, the same line she shares at the dining room table year in and year out: “Are you havin’ a little trouble down there, ho-ney?” We continued to laugh together until our sides hurt. 

From that point on, my grandmother told me, I never complained again. 

Two winters ago, I snapped into a pair of cross-country skis for the first time in 25 years, and joined my grandmother, then 82, for a jaunt around the groomed track at White Farm, laughing and reminiscing about those days. 

We don’t spend much time exploring the vast trail network anymore (I think we’d both walk away with injuries now), but we enjoy moving slowly and observing what’s around us: cardinals perched on dark branches, the dull blue-gray of a winter afternoon, the fresh, crisp air touching our faces. 

As a child, I spent a lot of time outdoors with my grandmother. I’d follow her around in the woods, spotting flowers behind a bright green bush or squirmy bugs wriggling within an upturned log. 

In the summer we’d make lunchtime excursions to the local brook, splashing one another in our shorts and T-shirts and to the big boulder up the road, the mission of course to scramble to the top first. In the winter, we’d point out the tracks of deer or fox on the path, noticing our boots leaving prints of their own. 

I learned a lot from my grandmother during this time. 

How to have fun. What’s life without a little competition? 

How to be fearless. That it’s OK to trek off into the woods on a cold day, even as a woman with a young girl in tow.

And how to be mindful, slowing down and appreciating the small joys that are often overlooked. I credit her with the unbridled enthusiasm I have for the outdoors as an adult today. 

But looking back on our time together cross-country skiing, there’s one lesson that strikes me most after all these years: that she taught me how to be vulnerable. 

When I peered down and saw my grandmother entangled in her skis, likely mumbling a few choice words that need not be repeated, I saw myself. 

In that moment, I came to realize that, despite seeming unbreakable, she had vulnerabilities of her own. That she could, did, and would fall. 

What I came to understand at the top of that hill, in my pink snowsuit and fluffy hat, surveying the scene below, is that falling is fine. 

You just have to get back up and laugh it off.