Earnest Talks

It’s coming up on the time of year when we would get bundled up, grease our sled runners with bacon grease and slide down the hill on 15th street. At least that was true when I was many years younger than I am now, back when we still had snow.

The road up Barger Hill was once one of the finest sledding roads known to any wide-eyed kid. We loved when it snowed because we knew it was time to get our sleds out and start making that road impassable to cars. That was before salt trucks, of course.

I remember bundling up so much that I could barely walk, which was the only way mom would allow me to go out into the cold air. We would walk our sleds up the hill, lie down on them and rocket down the hill, ending up on 15th street in front of our houses. Over and over we did this until the street was a sheet of ice from the sled runners.

The time came when we could no longer use the street. The city started plowing it before we could make it impassable. The people who were building the big houses at the top of the hill insisted upon being able to drive home. We thought that was pretty unreasonable of them. After all, there was a little back road they could use. It was barely one lane, but it would have allowed us to keep our sledding track.

Also, it has been quite a few years since that much snow has fallen on my little hometown. When I’ve been home I’ve seen kids sliding down the dead grass on the hillsides. No sleds, though, just cardboard. What a poor substitute for flying down that icy hill, barely in control of a speeding sled, laughing all of the way down.

If we reverse global warming and widen the back road will you give us back the road up Barger Hill?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under childhood, kenova. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.