The Sledding Hill We Built on Our Pasture

I heard the tractor before I saw it. It was a little after nine in the morning the day after Christmas, bright and still and so cold the air squeaked, and I was out in the yard warming up the pickup to drive to the clinic.

The sound came from across the section road, from Orvin Kask’s place. That was not unusual by itself.

Orvin was 69 and retired, but he still started his old tractor most mornings in winter just to keep it honest.

What was unusual was the spreader hooked behind it. I could see the box from our yard, and I could see the beater turning, and I could see a brown fan of something flying out the back.

He was driving it down the hill. Not along the top, where his old cattle shed sat empty, but straight down the face of the hill, right down the middle of the run every kid in Hallock had worn smooth for forty years.

I stood there with my hand on the pickup door and watched him go down slow in low gear.

The spreader threw frozen chunks and straw in a wide brown stripe across the snow. At the bottom he turned around and came back up beside it.

Then he went down again. And again. By the time I made myself get in the truck, the whole face of that hill was brown from the top fence to the bottom fence, and the smell was already drifting across the road.

I knew why he was doing it. Everybody would know by noon. My son Bodie, who was 7, had broken Orvin’s corner post on Christmas afternoon, and this was Orvin’s answer.

Bodie got a blue plastic sled for Christmas. It was nothing fancy, the kind with the molded handles on the sides that you buy at the farm store for twenty dollars, but it was the thing he had circled in the catalog in October.

He opened it before breakfast and carried it around the house all morning like it was a puppy.

He slept with it, I found out later, on the floor beside his bed on Christmas Eve, after he had peeked.

We had my husband Kurt’s folks over for dinner at noon. Ham, scalloped potatoes, the green bean thing my mother in law makes every year, and lefse she rolled out on our counter while the boys watched football in the other room.

By two o’clock Bodie was standing at the door in his red snowsuit with the sled under his arm, asking every three minutes if it was time yet.

Kurt finally laughed and said he would watch the cows if I wanted to take him.

So I walked him across the road to Orvin’s hill. That is what everybody called it, Orvin’s hill, the old town hill, even though it was just the long slope off the north end of his place where the ground falls toward the river.

Hallock is flat. Anybody who has driven through Kittson County knows how flat. You can watch your dog run away for three days.

So a hill with any real pitch to it is worth something up here, and Orvin’s had the best pitch for twenty miles.

And Orvin let them. He never put up a sign, never said a word, never asked for anything.

Most winters he would plow a spot along the road so the parents could park. He would wave from his kitchen window.