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.

We Don't Come From the Land of the Ice and Snow

Snow days in the South are a blast. You can stay home and watch the beauty of the fat, white flakes falling gently to the ground. At some point, if you are lucky, the snow will start to stick, covering the bushes and the trees and grass with a cottony softness, until the whole neighborhood glares pure white. Children will bundle up in their warmest coats and gloves and hats and scarves and pour out of their front doors. From inside, you can hear their yells of delight as they sled down driveways and throw snowballs and pile up what little snow there is into something resembling a snowman, complete with stick arms and maybe a spare scarf and hat. After everyone is icy wet and red cheeked with cold, they come back inside to warm up with a movie and a steaming mug of hot cocoa. Sounds great, doesn't it?

Only we don’t get snow days all that often. Instead, we get the clusterfuck known as the ice storm. I don’t know how you Northerners deal with ice storms, but here in the way down South, we like to run around like decapitated chickens. First, we have to do a bunch of speculatin’. Will it or won’t it? When’s it going to start? How long is it going to last? You would think the Great Blizzard was coming, threatening to trap us inside our homes for weeks as opposed to the potentially twenty-four hours we might have to remain inside our largest investment, the one place we are supposed to be the most comfortable and relaxed. We don’t have ankle monitors or house arrest, we have unsafe roads. We need to get over ourselves here in the land of cotton.

Today is one such day. Last night across the South, we all fretted about the amount of milk and bread and eggs, whether school would be cancelled or not, if the storm was in fact a storm or a bunch of hype. In my house, we started the day with the realization that we forgot to set the alarm, followed by the shock that it wasn’t Saturday, which gave way to the panic that we had to leave in a half an hour for school, which had not been cancelled despite an eighty percent chance of sleet and freezing rain with high’s in the low thirties.

By some great miracle, the children were ready for school, dressed appropriately and breakfast eaten, in only thirty minutes. School began for my younger daughter, S, at eight, and for the older one, E, at eight-thirty. At 9:15, the school board decided to rub their three brain cells together and cancel school at ten. Forty-five minutes doesn’t allow much time for school buses and parents to figure out how to get kids home. Luckily, we had told both of our daughters to ride the bus home if school dismissed early, and they both checked to make sure they had keys, so we had our plan.

I decided to not stand out in the sleet to wait for S’s bus, figuring since she had a key, she would just walk the one lot's distance from the bus stop to her house and let herself in.  Instead, she called from one street over. It seems that since I didn’t wait for the bus, she figured I wasn’t home, and instead of letting herself into her own home with her own key, she would go to a friend’s house and call my cell phone.  Way to problem solve, eleven year old child of mine. I can see how that Montessori education has paid off with your ability to think through a situation and of course your independence.

The teen, even more resourceful, texted me at ten to let me know that school was dismissed. I reminded E that she was to ride the bus, to which she replied she was “just checking.” Then she asked where her father was. I texted back he was getting his hair cut, so she tried him next, texting him that school was out and in total chaos. He didn’t fall for it either and reminded her about the bus.

I should mention at this point that there was maybe a little frozen drizzle. We are not talking branches knocking out power lines and thick ice accumulating on roads. The town was not a skating rink.

Around 10:40, I texted E to find out where she was.  She texted back that the bus never showed up and she was still in class with the other neglected children whose parents refused to pick them up at school. I hopped in the car and drove, turning at a side road that heads to the back entrance of the school. The road was blocked by a cop car, two ambulances, and a couple of fire trucks. After being detoured through a neighborhood, I drove the other way to her school. On the bridge in that direction was another accident, less severe in that it didn’t block the whole road, but still it involved two trucks, one of which no longer had a rear axle. I was able to pass both these accidents safely because I, a woman who learned how to drive in Florida, slowed down and did not jam on my brakes. I picked up my daughter and drove back home without incident. 

A little while later, one of E’s friends texted her to see if she was hurt. It turns out that first accident I saw was E’s bus, on the way to her school. It skidded off the road and landed on its side, and luckily there were no children yet on it, although the bus driver may have been injured.

So now trapped inside, as we knew we would be, boredom has free reign. Three fights have already occurred and a giant bag of popcorn has exploded all over the floor. The laundry has been washed, but the piano remains unpracticed. The iPad needs to be charged so it can be fought over again. According to my children, there is nothing to do. According to me, there is a ton to do, and if they don't stop complaining, they are going to have to do it. The whole ton.

On the plus side, I have just witnessed a thirteen year old have an actual lying on the floor kicking and flailing and crying tantrum. It looks a lot like when a three year old does it, only with black tears from the massive amounts of caked-on mascara. I had to issue a time out, but not until it was declared that I don’t understand and I don’t care, which is kind of true. I don’t care. It’s sleet. Go practice for the SAT you might not be taking tomorrow. Go read a book. Go take a shower or text your friends or learn how to masturbate. There are LOTS of things you could be doing if you got off my floor and acted your age.

Anyway, it’s sleeting. I can hear the little icy pellets bouncing off the windows.  Tomorrow it is supposed to be sunny and in the fifties. And all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. I better go hide all the axes.