You know the drill. It’s 9 in the morning and you’re eating Frankenberries in front of the TV. Bugs Bunny and friends, Foghorn Leghorn, all those sketched characters who have become like brothers to you. Your mother is in the living room, vacuuming and dusting, moving from one task to another like one of those servant robots you read about in the comics. The house smells like Pine Sol.
“Ma,” you say in your whiny voice. “Hey, ma. I’m bored!”
Good old Ma gives you a look of exasperation, an expression only a mother can master. That look says she’s one good offer away from selling you to the carnival, or whoever will take you, really.
“What do you want me to do about it?” she says. “Go outside and find something to do.”
“Go outside” is a mother’s answer for everything. It’s like “have a bowl of soup” when you’re hungry or “drink some water” when you clearly want Coke or Pepsi or grape Kool-Aid.
But you go outside, anyway, squeezing on those bulky boots with the fuzzy liners and the snow pants that strap over your shoulders. It’s bitter cold outside and your nose starts running. The clear liquid that runs from your nose is too innocuous to be called boogers and it freezes to your snow mask almost immediately. There’s a certain smell about your snow mask, one that you barely notice now but one that will stab you with nostalgia in 30 years when you’re shoveling the driveway yourself because your rotten kids are too busy playing video games to do it. Spoiled pukes. Why, when you were a boy …
But right now, you ARE a boy and you’re dragging a bright orange sled over to the armory. The sled has a few cracks in the bottom and it won’t last the rest of winter. Good riddance to it, you think. In the spring, you’ll convince your Ma to buy you one of the better, sturdier sleds when they go on sale at McCrory’s. Maybe for your birthday in June.
On second thought, that’s a terrible idea. What kind of present is a sled when your birthday is in June? A birthday present is something you can use immediately, not something that goes straight to the basement.
Behind the armory, the kids are out in full force. The little ones are on the smaller hills, trudging up and down through the snow and trying to not get creamed by bigger kids as they come zipping down from the monster hill that seems to start all the way up in the clouds.
You run into Randy and Richie and Rusty out there and you join them on the long climb up into the clouds. Richie is 12 and he just got his arm out of a cast after he busted it in gym class. His mother would totally freak out if she knew he was out here sliding with that barely healed bone, but his mother worked a second job on the weekend and she’s oblivious. An oblivious mom is a good mom.
For four hours, you slide. For four hours, you are alternately freezing cold and baking hot, depending on whether you’re climbing or sliding. There’s carnage on the hills. Rusty slid out of control and into a bush and now he’s got a wicked bad cut below his right eye. Some little kid got run over by a sled as he climbed the little hill and now he’s out there in the snow bawling by himself and holding his head. There’s a rumor afloat that last week, a kid died on these hills, but there was never anything in the paper, so you remain skeptical.
Four hours of sliding on the bright, cold winter day. Two hours of snowball fights on the way home and one smaller round of bombing cars. Someone hurled a snowball at an old lady’s Pinto but you swear it wasn’t you. Even 30 years later, you swear it.
By the time you get home, sweat and various kid goo has bonded your snowsuit to your skin. You eat chicken nuggets and Ore-Ida french fries from the toaster oven. You start watching a Creature Double Feature on TV38 but you get bored with it. The giant insect ones just aren’t believable.
“Ma! Hey, Ma, I’m bored!”
All of that went through my head like a hallucination one recent night after I slipped on a face mask to snow-blow the yard. For a few seconds, I thought I was having a stroke or an acid flashback. It’s the wool blend, you know. That stuff is like a time machine.
Such sweet memories. Such different times. Better times, really.
I still hate winter.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You winter-loving kids at heart can taunt him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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