On Christmas Day, I spent an hour or so outside sledding with my daughter Lyndsy. We did this in our own front yard, which has no real slope to speak of. But with the hardened snow and ice combo that’s formed over the past few weeks, it made for some rather exciting sledding for a 4-year-old. Well, that is until her sled ran smack-dab into a tree. Now keep in mind, she couldn’t have been going any faster than 2–3mph when this happened, but to her, it was quite the dramatic and tragic event. This got me to thinking about how we all perceived things when we were little kids. As children, things always seemed so much more grandiose to us than they truly were.
Growing up in Colgate, my childhood friends and I named a hill by us “Killer Hill”, for it was the steepest, longest, meanest sledding hill in the entire world. It was the type of hill you never went sledding at alone, for fear that you might not make it home to Mommy for a comforting cup of hot cocoa. Even when we’d go sledding there as a group, we’d be sure to tell everyone along our way where we were going, as if to brag about the adventure we were about to undertake. Then as I began growing into my teenage years, I started realizing that almost everyone I knew had been to “Killer Hill”. Of course, this didn’t make any sense to me since none of these people grew up near me? But then I figured it out that every neighborhood and/or city in the Midwest had it’s own version of “Killer Hill”. Looking back, it strikes me as funny how each of us as teenagers would boastfully proclaim that our “Killer Hill” was the biggest and baddest sledding hill in the entire world.
In subsequent years, I’ve passed by my “Killer Hill” while snowmobiling, and I was quite surprised how small it actually was. It was nothing like the mean, child-eating menace I remembered it being as a kid. In fact, it was just a small, gently slopping hill that unceremoniously fed itself into a cow pasture. I guess this helps me understand why my daughter caused such a ruckus when her sled bumped into that tree on our front lawn. I wonder if next year, as she goes through her first year of school, she’ll describe our front yard as “Killer Hill” to all of her classmates?
G’Night G’Town!
While we try to teach our children all about life,
our children teach us what life is all about.
~Angela Schwindt
