But last weekend was another story. Fresh powdery snow, reasonable temperatures under a sunny sky and a brand new snow tube waiting for a first trip!
When we were kids, mom would take us up to the golf course near where she grew up. As with every golf course, there were a variety of hills: shallow slopes, fast slopes dotted with moguls, and the infamous "heavenly hill." I'm still not clear whether the name was an allusion to the fun a child had while flying down the hill on a toboggan or the likelihood of death if you ran into any of the trees or the tennis court at the bottom. Either way... we loved sledding as kids.
My most vivid memory of sledding was trekking up the hill that mom had forbidden me to go up. "The big kids are all up there." I'm not sure why that would have been a deterrent. Clearly I was old enough to sled where "the big kids" sledded. I snuck away from the hill I was supposed to be on, and headed up the hill. I climbed onto my cheap, plastic disk sled and off I went. I was moving! I was spinning! I was screaming! I was flying! Literally. I flew off the edge of a sandtrap and fell approximately 27 feet to crash onto the hard, unforgiving sand below the cliff I had come over. - Ok, so it was probably a four foot drop. - I lay there, wind knocked out of me, unable to cry, unable to call out, terrified of being found on an off-limits hill, unwilling to get up. Eventually I pulled myself up, cried myself the rest of the way down the hill and confessed my crime. Mom laughed. I was still in one piece. I was able to communicate what had happened. She took my hand as we trudged up the shallow slope and took several slow rides down the hill together.