People are posting pictures of snow, and this stirs up some of my fondest childhood memories. Our house sat almost at the top a hill and the road was paved with a chunky asphalt. A drainage pipe laid under each driveway installed by the city, and I remember ours had a concrete bowl in the ground at each end of the pipe where the water could pool to slow the flow. Daddy would hunt for a fallen tree, or an old, sickly-looking one to chop up for firewood and fill the concrete pit to start a bonfire. This sound of the chainsaw made Mama nervous because Daddy was an alcoholic and hearing the saw meant he couldn’t handle his liquor, or an ax that day.
The sleds were made of wood with metal runners. Mama would lay a stub of a Christmas candle into my gloved palm to rub along each runner. The wax was supposed to serve as a barrier to protect the metal from the sloshy snow, but we all knew it also made your sled go fast. Every kid on the street would bundle up with layers of clothing until they could barely move and grab their sled to gather at our part of the hill to be near Daddy’s bonfire. The boys took a long time waxing their runners because to them it was a competition to see whose sled could go the fastest. For them it was a race to the bottom of the hill, but I was little and just wanted to go sledding.
Mama would yell from the porch, “Watch out for the kids smaller than you”, and Daddy would back her up by telling my older brother, “Don’t let your sister get killed.” Daddy’s one rule was, don’t wind up in the gully, mainly because he didn’t want to climb down in there to pull us out. So, if we lost control of our sled and were headed for the gully, we’d roll off into the street and let the sled keep going without us. It would stop without any weight on it, but you’d have to move quickly and pray there wasn’t anyone coming down the hill straight at you or one miscalculation would turn into two. Those sleds were such a rush, but the metal runners could slice off a body part.
Our street came to life with lots of screaming and yelling and it’s a miracle that any of us lived through it. Mama did a lot of praying, but if she heard crying, she knew which kid it was by the pitch of the cry and if they were injured, tired, or just having fun. The longer the day went the wilder it became until Mama would step outside onto the porch and call me inside. It was sad to leave the excitement of it all but would soon realize how tired and frozen I’d become after stepping inside the warm house. We were all so exhausted from playing so hard out in the freezing temps and Mama was relieved once we were all home safe.
You want to see your neighbors? Let the power go out and life as we know it comes to a crashing halt. Everyone will step outside just to make sure it’s an overall outage and not the power company cutting us off for forgetting to pay the bill. Your inner child squeals with delight in hopes of finding freedom at last, but that inner excitement is mistaken for panic and thinking sets in. Try as we might to figure out how to resume normal life with no power, all we have to do is listen deep within. Hopefully, you’ll hear the mumblings of our inner child calculating the amount of clothing it’s gonna take to go outside and play.
Photo by Janosch Diggelmann on Unsplash
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