it snowed today!

never would have thought we'd have actual snowy weather but here we are
very powdery so not good for making snowmen despite my best efforts, but hey. i'll take anything nowadays

my older sister texted me randomly at like 9 pm asking if me and my younger sister wanted to go sledding, and i figured, why not? what have we to lose?

so of course, instead of finding actual snow gear that definitely exists in my house, i threw on a second pair of sweatpants and an extra jacket, alongside my doc martins, a pair of gloves, and a beanie rather than a bucket hat.

at first, we went towards the weird little hill near the end of my driveway, which we went down a few times, but it wasn't good enough. we tried the road, cause my house is pretty much at the top of a hill, but it was pretty mid. i hurt my knees trying to sled down it.

as i was laying in the middle of the road, half on the sled and half just in the snow, it made me think about when i had been emailing theghostwhowalks about snowdays when i was younger.

at my old house in virginia, my backyard was literally a hill. like a solid hill, it was really hard to climb and you couldn't really do much in my yard since... it was a hill.

BUT! it was a hill, so when it would snow, we got a great sledding opportunity. at some point in the like, 7 years i lived there, my dad added a fence around our yard, which posed an issue with the sledding.

we would still sled, my siblings and i, except then there was a fence in the way.

what happens when a pair of children on a sled moving quickly down a sloped, near frictionless surface, make contact with a fence? if you guessed "hole in fence" happens, you'd be very correct.

we kicked a hole in that fence. broke on of the boards. it was a vibe.

our neighbor behind us and off to the left had a really good, steep, unfenced hill though, so what we'd end up doing was going out of our side gate and then walking down alongside the fence past a bunch of pine trees to their backyard. they had a very sleddable hill. 10/10 would sled down their hill as a full 17 year old now.

like i was saying though, me and my siblings wandered around trying to find a good hill. eventually, we realized that we in fact had a hill that would work great. the first few times we tried it, not so great. i came up with a weird strategy to sit on the sled sideways so you could get enough momentum, but oftentimes would crash.

then, my younger sister called us over to our neighbor's yard.

for context, in the woods a bit away from where my house is, there is a random man-made hill. it's at least 8 feet tall, probably closer to 10, and it's wide enough that you could safely walk on it or drive on it with an ATV and still have about 2 feet on each side if you were driving in the middle.

the reason why i bring this up, is because my dad told me that they were originally going to have train tracks there. why? i dunno. point is, they had to get the dirt to build that hill from somewhere. where? my next door neighbor's backyard. literally.

so my neighbors have a really big ditch in their backyard. and since they have a ditch, that also means, they have a crazy hill for sledding. CRAZZY HILL.

it is very steep, so climbing back up after going down it was quite a toughy. nonetheless, it was quite thrilling to sled down it, and every single time we went down, we'd have enough speed that we'd end up going back up the other side and sliding backwards down the ditch again.

my younger sister had this one run where she drifted fully into a tree, it was really funny

genuinely i was doubled over laughing at her

but anyways, eventually we overused the hill so we started going to look for a new hill and we got back to the kinda mid hill that was in our backyard

fortunately, it had snowed another like half inch in the time we were in our neighbor's yard, so i figured, hey, i'll give it another go even though it was really not great before

let me tell you guys
solid hill
i'm really bad at estimating distance but i got a good 20 feet

i also figured out that if you wanna steer where you are going when you sled, which, why would you? it's so much funnier to run into something, but if you wanted to, you kinda shift your weight in the opposite direction of where you wanna go

you could also use a foot or hand to turn, but then you risk losing momentum or hurting your hand, so yeah just lean

but we wandered a bit more, they went to keep looking for a hill and i decided i wanted to go back to good old faithful hill

went down a few more times and then i was a bit too cold so i finally went back inside after a solid hour of playing in the snow

tonight has been very nostalgic for me, especially since we don't really get snow anymore with global warming and also it's just maryland, but i had a lot of fun. i also kind of realized that despite being 17 and my siblings being 18 and 15 (19 and 16 in may), we're still very much kids to put it one way. we went outside into the cold with one single goal, to entertain ourselves and sled. and we accomplished that.

sometimes life can be really simple if you focus on the moment and i love that

on a sadder note, i got water in my phone while we were running around fortunately, it dried, so i was able to plug my phone in and charge it, but i got kinda worried for a bit hahaha

i can't really remember if there was something else i wanted to mention in this post, in case it isn't apparent, i write with no plan in mind except for the topic. the words just happen.

so, i'll leave it off here. i too hope that school gets cance/led, a delay is not enough, and i hope everyone is/was able to enjoy the snow we got. i definitely did, ignoring the complete lack of school-related productivity over this weekend. i was productive, just not in a way that will help my grades (insert shrug emoticon here).

cheers

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