winter fresh

It’s been snowing for the last forty-eight hours, and it’s supposed to keep snowing for the next forty-eight. This does not bode well for the driving over the pass of hairpin turns and steep inclines that A. and I are supposed to do on Sunday morning. No, no, it does not. At noon on Friday, they had measured 21 inches at the nearby ski resort.

I’ve figured out why they give you those “2” and “L” options for gears in the car. It’s brilliant. (Still wishing for a Land Cruiser, though. Then maybe I could not be the person driving 35 in a 65 with a whole line of cars behind me, practically panting to overtake.)

Yesterday, while waiting for my sister to get done with work, I watched the snow fall. I watched the snow on the roof build up until it slid off two stories to the ground with a thump. I watched the cars slip-slide as they tried to get out of the parking lot.

And I formulated a PLAN.

I sprung it on A. as soon as she left her office. “We’re going sledding!” I told her, all but leaping about like a five-year old. She glared at me. “I’ve had a bad day. Why are we going sledding?”

“Because!” I said, chasing her down the stairs, “It will be fun! You’ll be in a better mood after you eat something, and then we’ll go sledding!”

The good news is that a friend of a friend holds the key to the sledding room at this resort-ish place, so we didn’t even have to use dining hall trays. Heh heh heh. We borrowed the key and got three brightly-colored plastic sleds. A. assigned me the green, gave D. the blue, and appropriated the fuchsia for herself. We took them out on the hill and threw ourselves down on them in the glow of a single light pole. A. and D. tried to stand on them like snowboards. We rode all on one, toboggan-style, and then we all piled on top of one another. We fell off laughing in the drifts and plodded up again.

My jeans were soaked through and my knees stung with the cold. Our faces were covered in snow every time we went down, blazing new trails in the powder.

And then we stopped and flung ourselves into the two feet of snow on the edge, buried our faces in it, and ate the snow like puppies do, disregarding the dangers of acid rain.

When the others were ready to stop and get warm, I wanted to keep sledding. I wanted to keep sledding so much that today, while they were working, I went back, alone. The only other people on the hill were a little boy and his dad. They took two more runs after I got there, as dusk was falling, and as they climbed up the hill for the last time, the little boy said to me, clinging to his father’s hand to stay on his feet, “You are lucky that you get to stay longer than us!” His father said they’d been there all afternoon.

I kept sledding, alone, on the same green sled as the night before, until I knew I had to bring the sled back so they could close. But first, I lay on my back in the deep snow, wearing multiple layers of jeans and sweatpants this time, and watched the unending snow, trying to find the point at which it stops being a gray mass and starts being individual flakes. The light came on, and the snow glowed under it. I kept wanting just one more run.

When I told A., she said, “You really are like a five-year old.”

I kind of like that. I don’t want to outgrow sledding. I also want to go again tomorrow.