never too old to have a little fun

There are no hills in the city of Chicago. Nevertheless, on Sunday at noon, my friend and I set off into the fresh powdery snow to find a hill and a sled, like so many 8 year olds before us. We had to be a little resourceful when our search for a plastic saucer proved fruitless. We snatched up the very last blow-up plastic inner tube at K Mart -- the one with the picture of a woman in a bathing suit floating on blue water on the box -- for $2.50 and plunged once again onto the mostly unshoveled sidewalks. I was slightly dubious that we'd find a suitable hill in Chicago at all, besides the few lame ones I'd scoped out in the summer, but we headed to Humboldt Park anyway, because the Internet said it had a hill good for sledding. We scanned the horizon of the park: nothing but white ground and scraggly brown trees. But as we made our way through the park and the snow halfway up our calves, a slight grade started to appear in the distance. As we got closer, we could see it was indeed a hill, and quite suitable for sledding purposes judging by the crowd at the top. We trudged on, hearts pounding in excitement, stopping once or twice to make a snow angel or to disrupt an untouched patch of smooth, brilliant white.


I had never been sledding before. This statement received many a "Huh? What? Really?" from my Midwestern friends and acquaintances, but it was true. I played in some puddles as a child, even got to throw a few snowballs on various occasions, but I never got to go sledding. Not in the hill behind my house, not in the golf course, not in the park across the street. Of course, in California, we didn't have any of that. So my friend briefed me on the sledding-hill etiquette that every 8 year old just knows.

"You sled down the middle and walk up the sides. Watch out for people going down in front of you or walking up the middle; they should move out of the way. Use your feet to steer if you need to. I'll give you a big push to start, or you can run and jump head first."

We jumped up the hill, smiles broad, ears full of the screams and laughs of kids and their parents, eyes full of families, and fun, and joy, plastic sleds, wooden ones, and trash bags, ones that went far and ones that pooped out in the middle. Kids in puffy coats and snow pants and snow shoes and hats and puffy mittens attached to their coats, rolling and sliding and running and smiling. We took all this in as we blew up our snow tube, which turned out to have $2.50 worth of holes.

I got the idea, anyway. After my first trip down the hill, even though my tube refused to move past the middle, I picked myself up, tube in hand, and ran the rest of the way up the hill, laughing and smiling ear to ear. There was something infectious about the fun in the air, and something absolutely liberating and magical about sailing down a hill of white with the Chicago skyline in the background. We made it down halfway a couple of times before a man overheard our sledding laments and said, "You want to try my toboggan? I've been coming here since I was 8 with this toboggan, and now I bring my kids and grandkids here and I'm sure they'll let you have a turn." We looked in awe at the old flat wooden toboggan with a rope running down the side and a curled up front and were soon being loaded onto it and pushed down the hill by a couple of the grown-up kids.


The hill wasn't really long enough for me to have time to experience many emotions while I was on the way down, but I did scream at the beginning, because we were going significantly faster than I had on the tube. And then slight fear, because there was a little kid in a lavender snow suit in the way, and then elation and laughter and we left the bottom of the hill and all the other sledders behind and slid out onto the flat ground beneath the hill. The grandkid who sat behind us picked himself up with a sigh when the sled came to a stop and said breathlessly, "That was awesome." I just laughed and laughed as the cold wind sprung tears to my eyes and I tried to walk on cold shaky legs and feel my hands beneath the gloves soaked with icy snow.

"I will remember this day forever," I announced before I went to bed that night. And I think I will. When i'm old, i'll group even this slightly-old-to-be-sledding memory in with my childhood-playing-in-the-rain memories and think back fondly on all the fun there is to be had with a little bit of precipitation and a lot of energy. I think i'll try to find a plastic saucer sled too, take all my friends to relive a bit of their childhoods next time there's a storm.

And, next stop, when the snow is wetter: a snow fort.