Snow Day

I love snow days. 

I mean, I LOVE SNOW DAYS.

When we were little, we live on the edge of the flint hills.  Which is to say, we lived where it was quite flat.  When it snowed we needed to find a hill in order to sled anywhere meaningful. 

We had a pond in our pasture a 1/4 mile from our house.  My sisters and I trudged down there on one such snowy occasion to sled down the backside of the pond, down on the pond damn.  Whoops... I mean, dam. 

Karalina and I would have been in elementary school, big enough to be more than 40 pounds or so.  Elizabeth was little bitty, somewhere in the preschool - first grade range. 

We were fairly genius back then.... much like now.  In our extraordinary physics calculations we knew that if we slid off the backside of the dam we would probably run right into the barbed wire fence at the bottom of that hill.  Karalina and I then built an embankment at the bottom of our sled run in an attempt to keep us from running into that barbed wire fence.  We would sled down the backside of the hill, slide up the embankment and then glide back down safely to the middle.

We were genius. 

It came time for the little one, Elizabeth, to sled down the damn, dam bank.  (I don't care how many times you watch Chevy Chase's Vegas Vacation, it never gets old.)  Liza laid down on out red saucer and made her way flying down the slope.  She followed the sled track perfectly; just like we planned...almost.

  She made her way to the bottom of the track and instead of gliding up and then back down the embankment.... she used it as a runway of sorts and flew down the sled track, down the damn, dam slope and then used the embankment as a launching pad. 

She gained quite the commendable amount of air underneath her as she sailed.  She sailed right into a barbed wire fence. 

When we ran down the sled slope and found her body she was hung on the barbed wire fence, unable to move.  As I recall, her neck was resting near the top wire of the fence and the other fence wires were suspending her other appendages in mid-air.  We had quite the time trying to pry our little sister off the fence while trying not to rip her clothing too badly and all the while trying to convince her not to tattle to our folks. 

Good times, good times...