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Well, we waited ’til the tail end of winter, but Lightning Bug finally had her first sledding adventure.  

She was nervous and excited about it – her only references were books where characters loved sledding, but the idea of hurtling out of control down a hill was still daunting.  She climbed into her big snow pants, big mittens, big hat, big coat, big boots; all the things that made it unlikely if she fell down that she would ever get up again.

We got to the top of a mid-sized hill, it’s early morning, 30 degrees, no one else around.  We ask if she wants to go on her own or with one of us.  “I go with you.”  I load her onto our red plastic sled, her in my lap, my big booted feet curled up around her little legs.  I slip in time to my childhood unsuccessfully trying to sled on the scant snow of northwest New Mexico, of hurtling down a truly wonderful horrific hill in southern Colorado (visions of Penti Gillespie gashing open his leg ramming into a concrete embankment at the base of said hill), of taking my older children down this very hill years ago, somehow getting up the speed to smash into the trash cans at the far end of the field (“the crash cans”), of so many snows over so many decades.

And here we are, a middle-aged man lost in countless old moments and a little girl who has never lived this moment before.

And we push off.

We hurtle down the hill, smooth like ice, I’m yelling “Whooooo”, Lightning Bug is… I have no idea.  I can’t see her face.  Is this amazing?  Is it scary?  Is it the first of hundreds of sled rides she’ll take, or the last?

We slow to a stop.  

I lean close to her ear somewhere beneath her huge woolen cap.  I still can’t see her face. “That’s sledding.  What do you think?”

“We do it again?”

“We can do it again.”

She races back to the top of the hill before me.