just when you thought you were too old for snow days.

I couldn't really explain the reluctance to go sledding, but I could surely feel it. Every time it snowed, every single time, Ashley asked if I wanted to go sledding. And every single time, I said no. Maybe it was all the work involved in just getting dressed to go sledding, the layer after layer of clothing you have to put on, even though you just know snow is going to end up in your pants.

But I relented this afternoon, put on three pairs of pants and who knows how many shirts before trodding out to a hill behind the math building down the street. I hesitated before going down the hill, watching others go first. I hadn't been sledding in years, maybe since I was twelve or thirteen. Finally, I found myself watching the bottom of the hill rapidly getting closer, and then the sled turned and I was watching the top rapidly getting farther and farther away. Snow found itself in the first of my pair of pants.

After a few runs down the hill, we hiked up a littler further to the mother of all hills behind the music building. It was long, it was steep, it was flanked by two very large, very brick buildings at the bottom. Again, I waited to take my turn, much longer this time. I remembered being very brave, or maybe it was stupid, as a kid. At some point, I had lost all that.

I went down the huge hill once. Snow in the second pair of pants. The climb was ridiculous. And then I got to the top, sat down on my sled, and just watched everyone else. I was done. The way I saw it was that I had one more pair of pants that didn't have snow in it, and I wasn't taking any chances.

Our little group was joined by several other groups quickly, mostly guys, though a bunch of giggling girls with matching Gap ski outfits took on a gentler hill behind us. The guys, they were idiots. I don't know who it was exactly they were trying to impress, whether it was the girls, each other, or God Himself with their defiance of gravity and their own mortality. They went down standing up, they went backwards, they talked in excited tones about "360's" while I highly doubted they even knew the geometry behind the term. And they were technically doing 180's, though I didn't bother pointing that out to them. Instead, I mused over using radians to describe their moves with Ashley. "Whoa! That guy totally did a two pi!"

So it wasn't a terrible time. I wasn't miserable, but I don't see myself giving in the next time Ashley comes bounding into my room with her long underwear on, begging to go sledding, even as endearing picture as that makes. Now I have a much more concrete reason not to go, that being that I don't get much of a thrill out of it. I could probably find something warmer to do.

Something where you don't get snow in your pants.