Ice will warn you. The crack that it sends up was always enough to send me running to the snow banked shore. But I still have to test it. I go on it. Every year. These frozen lakes of Minnesota. Maybe it’s the thrill of the improbable. That this water will hold. Hold me. 

I suppose it’s the same with people. Even warned and cracked, we go back in. Maybe this one will hold. This love. And sometimes you think how improbable — that you could be loved at all. Then one day, you find yourself standing on the same thin ice, year after year, with someone willing to embrace the improbability of it all, willing to test the hold, that you will love them, day after day, into each new season. 

And it’s not for the proof. Not, “if you really love me you’d….” No, that never works. There are no guarantees. And would we even want that? I don’t think so. The magic of being in love, with all of its flaws and cracks that ring out into the air, daring the daily hold together, this is nothing short of wonderful! 

I didn’t know, as we stepped out onto the ice, that they had renamed it, this Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska. Google says it was to “alleviate the pain of that history and celebrate instead the dignity of those who originally named the lake.” Maybe we’re all trying to do that. It’s all so slippery underfoot, as we try to get it right. But again, maybe that’s where the love is, in the trying, the daring, the renaming, the doing better… the ever attempt in love. 

Out on the ice, we smile together, in love’s hold.