The Sledding Hill We Built on Our Pasture

Every time I drove past, it was there, a brown stripe down the white, and every time I thought about what it had cost him to look at it.

Kurt said he would set the new post in May, when the frost came out.

Orvin heard about that somehow and called the house and said no, he would set it himself, but he would take a hand holding it straight, if Kurt was offering.

We did not put up any more notes. We did not need to.

By ten the next Saturday the pickups were already lining up along the fence, and the man with the burn barrel was already at the top of the run.

Nels was back with more square bales. He built the ramp a little higher this time, and he packed the landing better, and the bigger kids cheered him when he finished. He nodded once at them, the way he did.

The old men from the café were back with their watches. They had a whole system now.

They had a starting flag, an old feed sack on a stick, and they had a chart with every kid’s best time from the Saturday before.

The sky was that same hard blue. The sun was bright on the snow.

I put on my red barn coat and my gray hat and went up to the top of the run to start waving kids down, and Bodie went running ahead of me in his red snowsuit.

He got to the top first. Then he stopped and stood there, staring at something lying in the snow next to the flag.

“Mom,” he said. “Mom, look.”

It was a toboggan. A long old wooden one, eight feet at least, the kind with the curled front and the slats worn pale from years of use.

There was a rope along each side, frayed and knotted, and an old cushion tied on near the back.

I had seen that toboggan before. Every winter for years I had seen it going down Orvin’s hill, with Orvin at the back steering and Ardis at the front, both of them in their sixties, laughing like teenagers.

It had not been there the night before. Somebody had carried it up the rise early that morning, before anybody came, and laid it in the snow at the top of the run, pointed down the hill.

There was no note. There did not need to be.

I looked across the section road toward Orvin’s place. His pickup was coming slow down the road toward our gate, and this time he turned in, and he parked along the fence at the end of the line with everybody else.

He got out. He had on his old barn coat and a pair of choppers, and he started walking up the side of the run toward us, slow, one step at a time in the packed snow, the way men his age walk on a slope.

Bodie ran down to meet him. I watched my son take that old man’s hand, and I watched them walk up the hill together, and I stood at the top beside the toboggan and waited for them.

When they got there, Orvin was out of breath. He looked at the toboggan for a minute, and then he looked at Bodie.

“She always rode in front,” he said. “You want to ride in front?”

And that is how the old wooden toboggan came to the top of our hill, and how it stayed there every Saturday the rest of that winter, waiting for whoever wanted to ride in front.