I grew up with a giant hill practically in my backyard. We called the area where the hill was the Dead End. Not from some ominous lore. The street it was on was a dead end. The hill made it dead. And the four trees stuck in the middle of it almost made me dead.
The four trees formed the four corners of a square. ‘Twas a wide enough square that we could go right through the middle of them. Usually. (Can you see where this is going?) Tom and I shared a sled. I was younger (and maybe still even smaller) than him. So I sat in front of him. The snow was well-travelled at that point. As we made run after run, the tracks dug deeper and deeper into the soft pack. Until calling it snow wasn’t being truthful. There were tracks that transmogrified the snow to more of a slushy-ice than true snow. But unlike train tracks, jumping these tracks was not just possible but likely. Especially since, though younger and smaller, I was heavier than Tom.
Almost from the womb, I out-weighed him. There was a time when he could scarf down an entire casserole dish of mac n’ cheese meant to feed a family of five (our family of five) in one go and not gain a blasted pound. So the anchor (i.e. me) in the front of the sled that day gave us a solid drag, keeping us on course. Or it could shift skittishly because that first tree was a little too close for comfort. And that’s what I must have done. Because suddenly we were ignoring the tracks of the previous umpteen runs and going off course. Right for a tree, of course.
“Brad!” Tom tosses a scream into my ear,, “jump!”
There goes Tom, making like a rolling pin off to the side away from the sled. What do I do?
Absolutely nothing.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I hit the tree. Face first. All four limbs splayed out to either side. And like a cartoon character, I ooze off the tree and fall back onto the sled. The momentum of the collision spins the sled around and I finish my journey, head first.
To Tom’s credit, he warned me. To Tom’s credit, he walked me back home.
As he ushered me into the house to our waiting mother, I stood stunned. I stood whimpering but too hurt to even cry.
“What happened?!” Our mother yelled in that tone that said how could you be so stupid to hurt yourself.
To his credit, Tom tried to tell her. But he was laughing too damn hard.
“Tommy! What happened?!”
“He…he…he,” he said between gasps, trying to put words after the pronoun. Finally he threw out all the words he could in one fell swoop. “HeHitATree.”
“He what?!” Our mom demanded, not-so-slowly losing her patience.
“He. Hit. A. Tree.”
“He hit a tree? With what?”
“His whole body! It was awesome!”
And here I’ll leave Tom, and our mother, laughing uproariously in the past where they belong.
I didn’t have hearing aids yet. I must have been all of five years old at the time. I’d already failed my first hearing test. But my first set of bionic ears was almost two decades in the future. I certainly didn’t have a problem hearing Tom’s warning. I was right in front of him. (Even if I were in another state, I wouldn’t have had trouble hearing him). So my hearing had squat to do with my hitting the tree. I think back now and instinctively cringe. Not because it hurt, though it most assuredly did, but because I instinctively think of my hearing aids.
I’ve not been sledding in decades.I’ve not been in a snowball fight in decades. I’m not a skier. I do own a pair of snowshoes. But those were a more recent purchase. Thanks to man-made global warming, there’s not been enough snow to actually use them in the past few years. I have poor circulation (thanks, mom!) and so I worry about my feet staying warm enough to last out in the snow for too long. But that’s a secondary worry. My bionic ears are my primary worry.
In my snowball fighting days, I used to hate getting hit in the face. The ignominy of getting thusly pasted was but part of the hatred. The other was the invariable snow that found its way into my ear. My middle ear has always been sensitive. And it was unspeakably uncomfortable getting snow in there. Of course there was something I could do about it.I could wear a winter hat. But no matter how hard my mom tried, I hated wearing winter hats. In the 80s it was damn near impossible to find one without one of those ridiculous pom-poms on top. So I rarely kept it on my dome once I got out of mom’s sight. That made my ears vulnerable. Getting a snowball to the face or even in the chest, ball debris would introduce themselves to my ear. Or if I fell off the sled, in the ear some snow would go. I can’t imagine having bionic ears and playing in the snow.
There’s only one snowy activity I’ve done regularly in recent years: walk a dog. Though his crossing the rainbow bridge was a couple of years ago, I still miss him. Even the treacherous Weezy walks.
Weezy was a puller. We adopted him at 5-going-on-6. Up till then he’s been living in New Hampshire house with a massive yard. He didn’t need to be leashed so he wasn’t. It took quite a while for him to accept walking on a leash down in Massachusetts. And when he got excited for a W-A-L-K he would forget how. Which was every time. I would get him to stop pulling but briefly. Most of the year, I didn’t care. He was a big Boston at 26 lbs but I had a couple of pounds on him. But in the slick now/slush/ice that is slathered on the sidewalks after a snow, it was touch and go.
More than a few times, I would take a knee as he took off. Thankfully only a few times, I fell on my derrière. The most dangerous spot was right outside my front door. There’s a set of stairs that ends in a concrete slab. The eaves above rain melting snow down and when it freezes, the first step really is a doozy. A couple of times I fell and yanked his leash causing him to stumble. It was one of the many times I was thankful he had a harness not a collar. I couldn’t imagine falling and choking him at the same time!
The fun of having bionic ears while walking a dog is for another post. But I’ll just say here that I always walked him with them in. Having them in during winter walks was scary because of the falls I took. Thankfully, the moldings make the aids fit snuggly. Even a jarring fall wouldn’t knock them loose. Yet another reason I’m not a fan of over-the-counter models; the rest in the ear much too loosely. A short fall and a sudden stop would pop those bad boys out like a cork on NYE. My bionic ears never once met the snow when I fell while walking Weezy. But that never stopped me from worrying they would.
It’s transformative:
Snow shows we’ve not beat Nature,
Snow can change aids too.
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