The edges of love

Love is a wonderful thing. The commitment of one human being to the wellbeing of another is surely to be cherished and encouraged. But you wouldn't want to take that sort of support for granted. Neither would you want to push that commitment too far. 

I perhaps might have.

Last weekend Dinner on the Table attended the Castle Hill UPmarket. Bright sunshine, friendly folk, good food and lovely, local gifts. Perfect. Especially for the occasion, we had a new setup, complete with a freezer from which market goers could purchase their dinner. Excellent.

The freezer lives in our big kitchen. I needed it at the market. We borrowed a trailer for the transportation efforts and all appeared to be well. At some point it did dawn on me that, even with my herculean strength, I was perhaps going to struggle to lift a commercial freezer into a trailer on my own.

I turned to the person I turn to most often on these occasions. The senior recipe tester, who not only possesses herculean strength, but titanic patience, agreed to help.

Because the market started early we had to dig the junior recipe testers out of bed on Sunday morning for the trip to the kitchen. Bleary-eyed and pyjama-clad they trudged to the car while I trilled merrily that it would not be long before Daddy could take them back home for breakfast.

Turns out it was very long.

Arriving at the kitchen we set about simply popping the freezer into the trailer and setting off. The trailer was not so far up off the road and we had a trolley. No problem.

We manoeuvred the freezer against the trailer tailgate and the senior climbed in. We reasoned we could tilt it back and simply heave it into the trailer. I pushed on the bottom, while the senior pulled from the top.

I thought we were making excellent progress. We were inches from having it aboard. I pushed some more until I heard an odd noise. I shouted instructions. No response. When I looked around the side of the load I realised the senior was wedged between the top of the freezer and the trailer cage. His face was red. He was unable to speak freely. He did not look best pleased.

I stopped pushing. We put the freezer back down on the road. We tried something else. And something else. The freezer remained resolutely out of the trailer. A couple of times a junior would emerge from the car to ask if we'd got the freezer on the trailer yet. By this time neither the senior nor I looked best pleased.

I'm always learning. Last weekend I learned how tricky it can be to get a large, cumbersome object to defy gravity, even if it only seems like a little bit. This week I will learn about lifting devices specifically designed for moving large objects off the ground.

And I have learned that love, the commitment of one human being to the wellbeing of another, might find its limits pinned under a large object and strained through a trailer cage.