The Sledding Hill We Built on Our Pasture

He ran a temporary wire along the east side with step in posts, hard work in frozen ground, and pushed the heifers back through the gate.

Bodie watched from the warm pickup at the gate for that part and thought it was the best day of his life.

Then he started on the run. He would drive up the rise, drop the bucket flat, and back down the slope with the bucket dragging, pressing the snow down as he went. Then up again, a bucket width over, and back down.

It took him all of the first day just to get a strip wide enough. The snow was deeper than either of us had thought.

Twice he had to stop and dig himself out where the skid steer had sunk into a drift near the creek.

The second day he dragged the bedspring. It was an old steel one from a bed his grandparents had, and it had been sitting behind the shop for fifteen years waiting for exactly nothing until that morning.

He chained it to the back of the skid steer and pulled it up and down the packed strip, and it scraped the ruts and lumps flat and left the surface smooth and fine, like a groomed ski trail in a magazine.

It was twenty two below that night. I know because I went out to check the waterers at nine and looked at the thermometer by the barn door. Cold like that will set a packed run up like concrete.

In the morning Kurt walked up it in his boots and did not sink. He stamped. He jumped.

Then he went and got Bodie’s blue sled from the house and carried it to the top, and he stood there a minute.

“You want to try it first?” he called down to Bodie.

Bodie shook his head. “You do it, Dad.”

So Kurt, who is 40 years old and six foot one and was wearing insulated coveralls, sat down on a little blue plastic sled meant for a seven year old and pushed off.

He went the whole way. Two hundred yards, fast, straight, all the way to the flat by the creek willows.

I heard him whoop at the bottom, a sound I had not heard him make since our wedding dance.

Bodie screamed and jumped up and down. Then he ran up the hill, slipping, and Kurt came back up with the sled, and Bodie went down, and then I went down, and we were out there an hour before any of us remembered the chores.

That afternoon I wrote a note on an index card and drove into town.

I pinned it on the board at the post office and taped one up by the register at the gas station, and I left one on the board in the church basement.

It said: Sledding on the Lindgaard pasture, east of town on the section road. Saturday from ten until the sun gets low.

Bring your own sled and your own cocoa. Park along the fence. All kids welcome.

I did not mention Orvin. I did not mention the old hill. I did not want it to be about that.

I wanted it to be about kids having somewhere to go during Christmas break, which is a long, cold stretch up here.

I thought maybe ten families would come. Maybe fifteen, if word got around.