Snow Days

On Wednesday of this week, we had a "snow day". Maddy was home from daycare, since the daycare said there was too much snow on the ground and the they would be closed.

I stayed home from work (and worked from home) on Wednesday, just because of the crazy people that drive too fast on slippery roads.

As I was shoveling out the driveway, I was thinking about the snow days when I was a kid. Growing up on the main road in my home town, we had an opportunity to have "across the street snow ball fights". This is where each "team" stands on either side of the street and tries to hit the team across the street from them with snowballs. Yeah, sometimes cars got in the way, but that never bothered us.

Across the street from where I grew up was an empty house lot. There was no house on it and it was an excellent place to build a snow fort. We would take metal trash cans and fill them with snow and create a "fort" that was unsurpassed by anything we have ever seen. We would roll huge snowballs as part of the fort. These snowballs were typically about 4-5 feet in diameter. The best part was we would take water hoses and lightly spray the snow fort to make it an ice castle. The center could be carved out and you could stash as many snowballs as you could for the upcoming snowball fight.

The local news paper would come by and take our picture next to our little piece of snow heaven and sometimes, if it was a slow news day we would be on the front page of the next days news paper.

The other opportunity of a snow day was to go sledding down "cemetery hill". Cemetery hill was about a mile long and was fairly steep by New jersey standards. Of course it was through a cemetery, but never seemed scary at all. It was also had a lot of curves, which made it excellent for creating a "train" of sleds going down the twisty hill, typically throwing someone off the back end of the train. It was also great fun. I don't know how many times I dragged my sled up that curvy hill or how many times I went down only to find myself in a snow bank. It was great fun and we never got tired of it.

Those days are far behind me now. The lot where we built countless snow forts, now has a house built upon it. Cemetery hill is still there, but I don't know if anyone goes sledding down it these days. Maybe I will drive by and check it out sometime after a snow fall.