Joy at the Top of the Hill

Chores done, we boys fled into the thick snow. A pack of us bundled up against the cold at our mother's fussing, sleds pulled behind us in mittened hands.

The memory is bright like a sunbeam, every detail crystallised. No rose-tinted spectacles; it really was as glorious as I remember.

Our lives were unrolled before us all like the carpet of untouched snow on that hill. We couldn't wait to plunge down it, faster, faster, shrieking all the way.

Cheeks pink, noses and ears raw, the sharp smell of snow and the sound of it under our boots and sleds... That was the day we flew. Like birds.

I've always liked birds. As a boy, I'd watch them flying until I could tell the species apart, just by watching their flight pattern. I'd wonder what it would be like to swoop and soar as they do. This is it, I remember thinking that day. I'm sure it was, only better, because I was firmly on the ground with no fear of falling from a heartless sky.

Oh, how fast we went! How the wind whistled past me! The exhilaration of it!

Fresh fallen snow covered a rock or root that sent the sled beside me careening off course, unstoppable, into a post. Jamie hit his head in the crash, the woollen hat his mother knitted protection only against chill. He didn't make it.

That was the last time I flew so carefree. Snow was never so smooth and white afterwards.