Snowy Memories
A good snow reminds me of snow days as a kid. (Also some
shenanigans and adventures as a young adult, but that’s a separate post ha) Growing
up in Maryland, we usually got a couple of snows every winter. They were usually
only a few inches, but that was enough for sledding.
The house I grew up in until I was 12 was on a hill from the front to back, so the side yard sloped down into the backyard. Excellent sledding on the side without the neighbor’s fence, except for 2 things.
- There was a tree right in the middle of the bottom of the hill (!)
- If you DIDN'T hit the tree, you kept going down a much bigger hill and would wind up on a highway (!!)
So we put a canoe pillow on tree and you actually aimed for it when sledding (it was a small hill). When I was little, I didn’t weigh enough to ever make it to the tree, but when one of my parents sat behind me on the sled, we very much did. Cue much excitement and giggling :D
When I was older my parents drove me to the ENORMOUS hill at
the middle school, and my friends and I would go FLYING. Especially the time I
hit a very well-constructed snow ramp 2/3 of the way down that was invisible
from the top of the hill. I was 8, I lived.
When we moved into another house when I was 12, I went
sledding in my friend’s yard 2 houses away, and she and her siblings had
constructed an elaborate sledding track that we whooshed along. It was kind of
like a luge track; I think they even poured water on it to freeze it. It had a
big curve so you wouldn’t sled directly into the basement of the house, but I
remember they banked the curve well. The level of difficulty increased when her
dogs were outside, because while the lab and German Shepherd just ran around in
the snow, the Rottweiler wanted to help you sled and would grab your foot and
try and fling you down the sledding track backwards. I wish I had photos/videos
of this, but alas I was born in the dinosaur ages before cell phones, so you’ll
just have to imagine. A lot of screaming and laughing and ‘Butchie, stop it!
Ouch! Quit it! Mooooooom!’
I think the coolest snow memory I have is from 1993, when we
had ‘The Blizzard of ‘93’. We got a good 2 feet of snow and were out of school
for the entire week. That’s like an extra Christmas when you’re a kid. My
friend Liz and I walked in the woods behind her street for what seemed like
hours and miles. Looking it up on a map as an adult, I think we walked ½ mile,
but in deep snow. We were completely in the snowy woods, and we found a stream
we didn’t know was there. We also found a deer antler. (Which as I was holding
it and Liz was like, that’s an antler, I dropped it in horror thinking that
meant there was a dead deer around. She laughed at me and informed me that deer
shed their antlers yearly.) Walking in the woods like that, an 8- and
9-year-old by ourselves, was just the coolest thing. We knew we weren’t lost
because we just had to follow our snow trail back. For some reason we never
tried to go back in warmer weather, so that place lives in my mind as our epic
snow adventure.
I haven’t sledded in a while as an adult, but I will always
enjoy a good snow, and even better when I hear kids squealing with
laughter playing in it.
