I grew up in a small town in central Ohio (We didn't even have a stop light). Living in Ohio means you live through Ohio winters. When you are a kid, Ohio winters are great (Not so much after you grow up).
When we were kids, we loved to see it snow. Living in the rural community where we did, snow usually meant school closings, and what kid doesn't like that. School closings created an outdoor adventure for us.
We lived close to a creek that froze over during the winter and we would go back there and slide on the ice (We never owned a set of ice skates). This was great fun until you would find a piece of thin ice. CRACK was a sound you didn't want to hear. I went through the ice once. Fortunately I just went in up to my right hip. Going home was very cold, wearing wet jeans. It's a wonder I didn't drowned in that creek, seeing that I can't swim. We have also seen the ice get up to a foot thick.
We never owned a sled either. We would take a piece of plastic, a garbage can lid, a car hood (yes, we were rednecks), or anything else we could find that would make us zip down the hills. One year I made my own sled out of scrap lumber. You couldn't steer, but you could ride. I set up a four by eight sheet of plywood on a mound of dirt by our house to make a "ski slope". I brought shovel after shovel of snow over to make the base slope. When it was finished, I laid down on my homemade sled and slid down the slope. It was great fun until I hit the bottom and came to such an abrupt stop that my hands jammed into the front of the sled, and I catapulted through the air and landed on my back. I threw the homemade sled onto the burn pile.
Snowball fights were big around our house, especially if Aunt Shelly's kids came over. Eight to ten kids in a snowball fight is a lot of fun. The only problem with snowball fights is that someone always thinks he has to play dirty. Rocks in snowballs are bad news. So are snowballs packed so tight that you might as well be throwing a rock. The worst are snowballs dipped in water, and allowed to refreeze.
When the snow would drift, we would tunnel through the drifts. Back then, we were invincible. It didn't dawn on us that if the snow tunnel collapsed with us in it, it could possible kill us.
We loved making snow men, but with the vast amount of leaves that were always present in late fall, early winter, our snowmen looked nothing like the pictures in books. Ours were a sort of mottled brown. A friend of mine said she always thought part of the song "Winter Wonderland" went like this: "In the meadow we can build a snowman, and we can pretend he's parched and brown." Sounds like ours.
What was your favorite winter activity as a child?
2 comments:
My twin brother, Johnny, and I loved sled-riding, too. We did some crazy stuff, though, and I'm amazed we survived to tell about any of it. We lived on a state route but a gravel road went up along the side of our property. This gravel road wound up a very long, steep and winding hill with two very sharp curves. We pulled our sled to the very tiptop of this hill. Johnny got on the bottom and I laid down on top of him and we commenced to FLYING down this hill. We wrecked on the first curve with both of us falling off, sliding all over the road on our stomachs. We retrieved the sled and trudged back up to the tiptop of the hill and started all over again. The second time, we made it to the second, reeeeally sharp curve. We couldn't navigate, ran into a huge pile of snow or rather Johnny buried his head in this huge pile of snow. But did we give up? Noooooo. We TRUDGED back up to the top the hill for round THREE! And this time we made it around both curves and FLEWWWWW down that road and hill. We made it clear to the state highway and just prayed that there weren't any cars coming! What memories!!
Growing up in west Texas and one snowfall a year, I can relate to 'parched and brown'...
Love hearing your childhood stories; I am sure glad you're hear to talk about it - snowdrifts, possible drownings and all!
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