Writing Prompt Wednesday: "Summer Sledding", a short memoir.

I wrote this last year, actually, when applying for acceptance into the Institute for Children’s Literature. They asked for a childhood story in 500 words or less on the application. This is what I came up with, and it is, indeed, a story from my childhood. 🙂  I was accepted into the Institute for Children’s Literature, but never enrolled. Now that I am coming up with some ideas for children’s books though, I will have to reconsider! Hope you enjoy!

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When I was young, a refrigerator box was one of the best treasures a kid could find.  The particular box I’m going to tell you about here was actually a real refrigerator box.  We could hardly wait until the refrigerator left the box to gleefully drag it outside.  Now, if only we could decide what to do with it!  There are so many things one can do with a refrigerator box, you see.  Should we play cops and robbers and make the box the jail?  Or shape it into a pirate ship?  Or maybe a spaceship instead!

It just so happened that at the time we lived in the country, and in one of the fields was a fabulous hill.  A hill so long and so steep that in the winter it sped you down in your sled so fast it made your eyes water.  So at long last one of us – I like to think it was me – suggested we use that glorious giant box as a type of summer sled and go grass surfing.  It was unanimously agreed, and we all trekked out to the field, box in tow.

We quickly found out that grass surfing and summer sledding doesn’t exactly work out as well as you might think it would.  We flattened the box out on the ground at the top of the hill, then took a running jump and landed atop it… the theory was that then we could ride the box to the bottom.  What happened in reality was that the box slid a few feet and then abruptly caught on a clod of dirt or a particularly tough tuft of grass and we’d go smashing to the ground.  Ouch.

So we hatched a new plan.  Open the box like a tunnel, lie horizontally inside of it… and ROLL down the hill.  Yes, this would be great fun, we thought.  Oh wait, but even MORE fun would be to have all four of us sisters climb into the thing at the same time, and THEN roll down the hill.  Yes, yes, we agreed, that would be splendid.  So we all climbed in and on the prearranged signal, threw ourselves down the hill.

What followed was not the exhilarating sensation of floating down a smooth slope, or even of rolling pleasantly down a gentle grassy knoll.  It was instead a nightmare of flailing limbs, brief, flashing glimpses of ground and sky, and the very painful experience of being kneed and punched in the eye repeatedly for what seemed like a very long time.  But you know what?  As we finally came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, legs and arms sticking askew from the ends of the box, groaning and moaning in pain, we all began to laugh hysterically.

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(photo credit: myself!)

Have your own story of summer sledding or refrigerator box mishaps?  Regale me in the comments!