Downhill blog.

The living room seems a bit larger now, with the Christmas tree out by the curb, waiting its landfill fate. Every year I'm amazed by the number of needles that a dead evergreen can deposit on the under its perch, along the route of its exit from the house, and especially in places where it didn't seem to go. Anyway, Epiphany has come and gone, so it was time to pack up all the ornaments and lose the tree. Somewhere on a tree plantation in Wisconsin or Michigan, there's a tree that will be harvested in about 11 months that will pass through our living room.

The highlight of the weekend was sledding. For Lilly, that is. She remembered on Saturday that she had a primitive sled out in the garage, the sort of narrow plastic basin that you can get at Wal-Mart for $2.99, made in China for 15¢ in labor costs, sporting the simplest possible steering system, a string tied up front. Red in color, easy to see against a snowy hill. In our case, the slope of a catchment on city property right next to the Community Recreation Center, where we sometimes visit the (indoor) water park.

I never experienced downhill sledding until I was 22, in Nashville, when a friend took me to Percy Warner Park, a nice hilly place, after the one of that town's not-too-frequent inch-plus snows (twice a year, maybe). Lilly, who's been sledding before but only occasionally, took right to it. Eventually she got so good that I didn’t think it negligent to go back to the car for a while to watch her from there, a little ways off, and to warm up my extremities, while she went up and down and up and down and tumbled around too.