I had to walk to school. Uphill. In the snow.

I've successfully avoided a new post for far too long. I knew I would suck at this blogging thing! I had to go back and remind myself of where I was. We're still in Connecticut and now I bring you... Snow stories.

We were now old enough to figure out how to have fun in the snow and how NOT to have fun in the snow.

We lived fairly close to my school. I went to Charles Barnum Elementary School. I'd like to tell you it was named after the circus guy and I really wish I could but alas, it was named after a doctor.We lived close enough that I had to walk there and yes. I walked to school. Uphill. In the snow.

In the 60's schools had very strict dress codes. For girls a skirt or dress was mandatory. Skirts and snow drifts didn't go well together so most of the girls wore snowsuits and boots over their school clothes and dress shoes and had to shed them when we got to school. At the end of the day we would have to struggle, unaided, back into them for our walk home. We still went outdoors for recess but we never put the snow clothes on for that because by the time we finished getting them on recess would be over. So unfair.

The playground at school was a large asphalt rectangle with hopscotch, basketball, four square and other game line painted on it. In the winter you can't see those lines... even after the snow plow goes through and creates these 2-3 and and sometimes 4 foot high snow walls around the edges of the now 'cleared' asphalt. It was okay that we couldn't see the lines though because we spent ALL of recess on the snow walls, running around the rectangle and jumping over the gaps where the gates and walkways came into the area. It was like we were playing Assassin's Creed decades before it was invented. It's a wonder that more kids didn't crush their skulls falling off that wall because I'm  here to tell you LOTS of us fell off the walls.

We had two sleds, a standard 1-2 kid wooden sled with metal runners and one of these new plastic discs.

You could sit on this and steer with your feet or lay down and steer with your hands.

There was a really impressive hill about two blocks away from our house that we would drag those sleds to for fun and adventure. It seems crazy now that we would spend 10 minutes struggling to get to the top of this hill when the ride down only took about a minute. On the other hand I guess that is not much different from going to a theme park and standing in a line for 45 minutes for a 2 minute ride. *shrug*

There was always someone getting injured on this hill... some of us told the parents about their injuries and some of us were too stupid to do that. You can put me into the stupid pile. As previously mentioned, we had one of those sled discs and since I was oldest I always sat in the back, with 2-3 other kids sitting in front of me. Our disc was larger than the one in the picture.

Look... I even found a disc sled pic with a cute little Asian kid on it!

 Perhaps I should start by mentioning that there was a rather large boulder at the bottom of this hill... Anyhow, we would load up that disc and go whisking down the hill and every time that disc would head straight for that ONE boulder and as we got closer, the disc sled would turn 180 degrees. At the tail end of the run. 180 degrees. EVERY. TIME. I had the back of my head slammed into that rock at the bottom of that hill more times than I could count and yet we continued to go back for more. I kept thinking that surely it won't go towards that boulder this time... surely it won't turn around this time... and SLAM! Did it again. This probably explains a lot to some people...

One day my brother, Don was dragging his regular sled up the hill and managed to get run over by a toboggan. In case you don't know what a toboggan is here is a picture.

Even penguins suck at steering a toboggan

Toboggans are not easy to steer. Not by grown-ups or penguins... and especially not by kids. That is why you pay attention when there are kids with toboggans. Don was thinking too much about getting back to the top of the hill and not paying attention. He was 5. It's allowed. Halfway up the hill he got run over by a kid filled toboggan but that didn't stop him. He got up, recovered his sled and continued up the hill and kept sledding for a couple hours.

Mom figured out that Don was injured when we got home and started shedding our snowsuits. His hood was full of blood and he ended up getting a few stitches that night. He never knew he was bleeding because snow makes everything okay.

More snow stories next time!