sledding

Remember what it feels like when snow wedges between boot and bare leg? How your skin turns red and you can see your pores and you brush at the snow with your mitten to get it out fast? Some melts. The melted snow gets the top of your sock wet. Your sock is already scrunched down around your heel because of the boot, because of the running around. Your sock's wet and your ankle hurts with cold, but it doesn't hurt enough to go inside.

You pull the leg of your snow pants back around the boot where it belongs and you grab your red plastic sled, last-year's sled, faded from being stored under the deck, just barely in the path of the sun. The sled has some brown leaves frozen into the back of it, in the hollow part behind the seat. You would have thought the leaves would have shaken loose when you flipped the sled, but they didn't, not yet.

You run uphill, next to the sled path that's been smoothed by the sleds going down, messed up only a little bit near the bottom where you dumped it last time. You pull your sled behind you by the rope and you dig the toes of your boots into the snow hard to get enough traction to climb the hill. You look back when one of your sled's metal brakes catches. You look back just a little too long and maybe you've veered into the sled path a little bit, a wayward step when your going-forward was stopped by the brake catching.

You look back for just long enough to pull your sled free, and when you look forward, BAM, your brother hits you full-on, his hard head catching your chin, making you fall over backward and wedging your boot full of snow again. Your face hurts from the impact and the cold and your brother's snowsuited body is on top of your snowsuited body and you push him off. Then he pushes you because you pushed him and because you were in the way.

And you never, even for a minute, imagine that you'll miss this someday, that your body will miss the impact of his body, that you'll miss all those times when you fought in the snow and he was right there at arms' length. You lie back and he lies back, and you and he are breathing hard and sweating in your snowsuits, and you're upside down on the hill with the blood rushing into your heads. You look up at the night sky, the tree branches, the dizzying stars. Someday you will ache for this.