Growth

Two boys, barely teenagers, found the coats heaped underneath a craggy tree next to the river. Apparently, a few of the trail’s earlier travelers had decided the day was too warm for them after all. Upon the discovery, the youths decided it would be fun to toss the apparently-abandoned coats into the river. Laughing, they made a game of it.

Farther down the trail, a quartet of elderly women exclaimed cries of oh dear as they saw their coats floating, half-saturated, through the frigid river. Though it wasn’t a very wide or deep river, there was simply no way the widows could leave the path and wade in to rescue their winter apparel.

Even father down the trail, two men also noticed the coats drifting along. There was nothing extraordinary about them, just your everyday brown-haired, balding, bearded men, but they felt they should to retrieve the garments. Protected only by Levis and Reeboks, they ventured into the arctic water, where they managed to seize all four.

Sooner or later, the men and the widows’ paths crossed, and coats and thank-yous were exchanged. The men returned home to dry their feet, the women returned home to dry their coats, and the boys returned home to decide on a video game.

The river continued down its avenue, eroding the banks, grain by grain. A bud, the first of spring, emerged from the tree’s highest branch. And as the sun cooled and set, the boys fell asleep in their beds, where they’d awaken one day older.

This is a true story I read in my local newspaper, (slow news day, I suppose) back when such things existed. It’s lingered in my mind over the years because of its reminder that people are a work in progress, that boys do mature into men, and we are all of us in a state of growth.