The snow was falling as I slowly opened my eyes. I was 12 years old and I had been excitedly waiting for the snow to finally appear. When I sat up in my bed, I saw nothing but white outside my window. I jumped up yelling, “It snowed, it snowed,” to my little brother. He woke up and we ran down to our basement to get dressed for a fun filled day.
When I was young, we lived on 5 acres where we had a small pond, a great sledding hill, and corn fields surrounding us. We spent the majority of our time outside together. In the winter we would sled, have snowball fights, go ice skating, and play hockey on our frozen pond. It was wonderful, and in all that snowfall we could pretend we were anywhere. We would be Eskimos in Alaska on a long journey one minute then secret agents in the mountains fighting off the most deadly snow ninjas in the world. We had great imaginations and we would run around and play till we were too tired to play anymore.
As my younger brother and I walked out the door, there was six inches of snow already on the ground and it was still coming down so hard it looked like a sheet in front of our faces. We ran to the barn and searched for our sleds until we found them in the attic. We cleaned them off and started trudging through the snow towards our sledding hill.
The hill was by the pond. It was about 30 yards down and it ran into a bunch of cattails that grew there during the summer. Every year on the first good sledding day we would continuously ride down the hill into the cattails until there were none left to see.
We set our sleds on the top of the hill. “Are you ready?” I said. My little brother had a big smile on his face and he was just as excited as I was. We counted to three, ran a few steps, then hopped onto our sleds. We started off fast, but soon our sleds were pushing so much snow that we stopped a quarter of the way down. A little bummed that we didn’t get to fly down all the way our first time, we picked up our sleds and walked back to the top of the hill and tried again. This time we managed to get enough speed to get nearly to the bottom. The third time was a success! We made it all the way down the hill and about 20 feet into the cattails.
Our fun filled day had begun! We stayed out there on that hill for hours building jumps and trudging up and down countless times. When the end of the day came we were exhausted but happy to have had such a wonderful day. We ate dinner and told our parents of all the jumps and fun things we had done that day on the hill and couldn’t wait for the next day to do it all over again.
Remembering those days is always fun. It makes me smile to think of myself as a young kid playing outside and in the snow with my brothers for countless hours. We had the greatest times together and we would come up with some absolutely ridiculous games and ways to entertain ourselves. I sometimes get really fed up with the cold and the winter because it causes a lot of difficulties for me now as an adult; but when I remember the times I had when I was younger and the pure excitement of seeing the first snow every year, it makes it so much easier to enjoy and realize how beautiful it really is.