A deep giggle escapes my mouth. Whoops! I try to control my laughter that was honestly a tad louder than I had intended, but the idea of trying to control my excitement seemed much too difficult to fathom. I let my face grin with confidence as I allowed my obnoxiously loud giggles to slip from my gut, though I know that if I had been in any other place I wouldn’t dare risk revealing my embarrassing trait of happiness.
We were atop the sledding hill a few hours after sunset and the darkness covered the white peak like a flannel. It was my first real sledding trip in years. Madison, my home town, has sledding hills that are hardly two feet steep in my neighborhood. Surely the bumps were enough to contain a seven or eight year old, but with little time and superiority in mind I rarely took to the little bumps that once brought me excitement and joy. Our upcoming sledding adventure was surely going to be a joyous reminder of my deeply missed youngin’ days. In fact it had been so long I had to be reminded of the basics in sledding technique. Watching my companions I quickly caught on and took my chance for the hill.
Running towards the slope with the tube in hand I went. Racing, racing, until I finally reached the drop off and hopped aboard my temporary ship.
AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
I screamed as I slid, plummeting to the bottom of the hill. Though it wasn’t until the second drop of the slope came into view that I began to realize my speed was dropping dramatically and my obsessive screams of excitement and joy seemed irrelevant. I looked back and observed that on my way down I had derailed off the packed snow course and was stuck in the powder covering the wetter layers of snow on the sides of the main slope. What a noob.
As I sat embracing the moment of my first sledding run in years I started to smile. No, I started grinning, giggling. Louder and louder it became until my laugh pierced the silence of the night. My tube sank deeper into the powdered snow with my weight and I still cackled with joy. I was a kid. I am one. I had regained my inner child, something I thought I had lost, all with the simple failure of sledding. I hopped off the tube and viewed my first slide. I wager I slid maybe fifty feet, if even. Hmmm… I’d have to fix that. With the tube lead in hand I worked my way up the slope, sticking my boots into the drifts to keep myself upright. But that I failed at too. I constantly stumbled and tripped over my winter boots in the darkness, laughing. What a noob.
Gasping for breath I finally reached the peak of the slope. I heard the screams of my new friends, with more experience, speeding down the hill with their laughter in the air. We all had found our inner childhood, leading it by its hand. Grasping the tube and my childhood in my heart I ran towards the drop off. I felt confidently silly plopping myself on my ship to Neverland as I raced down the hill. But this time, I was no noob. I was a child. I am one.
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