It's All Downhill

I joke a lot about how I have never been skiing because I am not the most coordinated person you’ve ever met. I am not a total klutz, but I do tend to get hurt pretty easily. That is because I am a delicate flower. I have broken eight of my ten toes, some of them more than once, doing such dangerous activities as walking down the stairs or folding laundry. So, no, I have never been skiing. It doesn’t strike me as my cup of tea. I've also never been snow tubing, which looks way easier, except for those videos of people hitting a rock or something and going airborne. No, I'm much more of an observer, a casual bystander. Someone has to be able to call 9-1-1. I'm the one with the phone.

In the past month, we’ve had a couple of big snows, well, by South Carolina standards, and honestly, there is only so much sitting inside with movies and cups of cocoa that one can take. I decided to make my family join me outside for some quality snow play. My daughters seemed pretty content to sleep what I like to call cat hours, a good sixteen out of twenty-four, but I encouraged them to get off their asses and join me in the cold.

Getting ready to play in the snow is not nearly the ordeal it was when the girls were little. At twelve and fourteen, they can dress themselves in layers and remember to use the bathroom. When the teen decided she didn’t need a coat while making a snowman, then she was a fool. A cold fool. But she wouldn’t freeze to death or catch a cold, so what did I care? It’s not like she would have stayed outside long enough to develop frostbite. The only bad part was the twelve year old stole my good gloves, the waterproof ones. And my favorite hat. I had to wear her knit cupcake hat. Do you know what a woman in her forties looks like wearing a cupcake hat? You will in just a few paragraphs.

We went outside, and my husband began the extremely intense job of making a snowman. I grew up in Florida, so I haven't really developed much of a snowman technique. My husband likes to take a snowball and roll it all over the yard, picking up the bits of mown grass while densely packing the snow. The burgeoning snow mound takes on a life of its own, growing in diameter and weight to the point where it has to be the bottom ball because no one can lift it. He duplicates this method on a smaller scale for the other two balls of the snowman, the head and the above the belt body. By the time this meticulous procedure has been completed, the rest of us have lost interest in snowman making and concentrate instead on eating handfuls of fresh snow and making intricate footstep patterns.

One of the girls  went in the garage and got out our purple plastic snow disc, the closest thing we have to a sled. It had a crack in it from last year and probably should have been thrown out then, but instead, it was all we had to work with. My tween, who is taller than me, sat on the disc in the middle of the driveway and waited for someone to push her down the gentle slope of concrete. No one had the strength to make her slide, so she just sat there like a frozen lump.

The teen decided we needed to try a better spot for sledding, so we trudged across the street to the empty lot catty-corner from our house. She found a nice little clear spot for sledding and went down the hill on the broken disc, screaming like the girl she is.

Next was the tween’s turn. Her ear piercing yells were either pure joy or terror, it was kind of difficult to tell. She fell over half way down the slope, but came up smiling, so it must not have been too bad. The two of them convinced my husband to take a turn, and he looked like that Norelco razor commercial from Christmas time, sitting upright and stoic as he wove through the trees until he came to a resting point in a clearing.

I was perfectly content watching the three of them go down the little hill and videotaping their efforts. Their joy gave me joy. But no, they wanted me to try it too. I declined, and with good reason too. It looked pretty steep there from the edge. And they were going pretty fast, something I don't cotton to. Also, I am a delicate flower, even in the snow.

As I protested, I somehow found myself sitting on the purple disc, continuing to say I didn’t want to try it. Don’t be scared, Mom, they said. It’s fun, they insisted. Don’t be a pussy, their father taunted.

“I really don’t want to,” I said, right before I was shoved down the hill. Everyone seemed to enjoy my ride, maybe including me, until I hit the tree.

Now, there is some discussion about whether I hit a tree or a sapling. I am going with tree. First of all, a sapling would have bent or snapped under the force with which I hit it. Secondly, it was solid, like a tree. And finally, it hurt bad, as evidenced by my screaming “Goddamn,” right before my husband stopped filming me, which was when the tears started. I hit the thing growing out of the ground, and it felt like a tree, and so, tree it is.

You know when you get hurt so deeply it takes a good week to bruise? Yeah, well, that’s what happened when I slid into the tree. A week until any discoloration developed. I did, however, have a lump that was like an extra butt cheek, only on my hip. We all referred to it as my lovely lady lump, and I liked to show it to my family to cement their guilt forever in their memories.

"I told you I didn't want to take a turn," I am still reminding them.

It was a big lump, but it was also a painful lump. The kind that makes you sleep on your other side because even a slighted whisper of a touch sends waves of pain throughout the body. The kind that makes your jeans fit funny. The kind that makes you hate your family for making you go down the hill in the first place.

Lucky for you, there is video evidence. Even luckier, I am posting it. According to my family, it gets funnier each time you watch it. If you are having a bad day, about three or four times is about all it takes to turn that frown upside down.

 

Don't even think I am ever going to try anything involving a hill, snow, and two sticks under my feet. I can't even sit on a big plastic Frisbee.