Jennifer George
“Oh, be careful!” I called to Olivia, my two-year-old niece, as she jumped on top of the checkered comforter on my bed. My heart skipped a beat as she landed too close to the bed’s edge, oblivious to the potential danger that she was in. “Be careful, or you might break your neck!” I suppose my over-cautiousness and worry comes from a childhood event that I recall vividly.
My cheeks glowed and my nose ran as I hurriedly shoveled the heavy snow off our deck. “Shovel it right over here!” my twin sister Erin called to me from below. The warm lights from inside the house glimmered and the porch light that Mom had turned on illuminated the pile of snow we were feverishly building. The snow fell, lightly covering the part of the deck we already shoveled.
Snow had been falling since earlier that afternoon when Erin and I had come home from elementary school. We raced inside to change into our snow gear. We pulled on boots, hats, and gloves and snagged some warm oatmeal-raisin cookies off the counter. “Mom, will you please zip my coat up?” I asked, my mouth still filled with a cookie.
“It might be easier if you put your gloves on after you zipped your coat,” Mom said shaking her head and smiling as she helped me. By the time we got all our snow gear on, we were sweating. “Quick, let’s go outside before I melt,”
The sky was grey as we entered the silent winter wonderland; snow was falling steadily. The cold, crisp air felt good on our flushed cheeks as we crunched down our driveway towards our meeting place. Our neighbor from across the street, Derek, waited impatiently for us at the end of the driveway. “Are you ready?”
“Are you?” I asked. I threw the snowball I’d been hiding behind my back, hitting Derek squarely in the chest; then the war began. The three of us scattered to our respective snow forts on each side of our driveway and began making more ammunition, while watching for any attacks from the enemy. The war lasted for several minutes, until we got distracted and decided to build a snowman.
Soon we heard a familiar call, “Derek! Time for supper!” After he left, Erin and I ventured into the backyard, wandering around waiting for a brilliant idea to come to us. Then we saw the un-shoveled deck awaiting us.
“Let’s use the snow from the deck to make a giant sledding hill!” Erin exclaimed. (Of course the hill would be huge to us only because we were in fourth grade.) So that’s what we did.
Finally, after we had scraped all the snow off the deck onto our big sledding hill, we were ready to try it. Erin and I clumsily ran through the snow to the shed to retrieve our hot pink sleds that we had gotten for Christmas the previous year. We dragged the sleds behind us across the yard back to our hill. “Funny,” we both observed. “The hill is as tall as our sled is long.” Oh, well. We had come this far—we couldn’t stop now.
I was the first to go down. As I set my sled on the top of the hill, my sled looked like a teeter-totter, balancing on the peak. Then, I quickly jumped in the sled; it moved a few inches and then quite abruptly, the sled stopped. “Well, that was fun!”
“Okay, it’s my turn now. Move outta the way!” Erin cried, determined not to miss out on any fun.
What happened next could have won the prize for America’s Funniest Home Videos, but it terrified me at the time. As my sled had stopped,
“Erin!” I ran through the snow to reach my sister, terror pulsing through my veins. My first thought was, “She’s dead!” I knelt down beside her and heard muffled laughter. I pulled
No, she was not dead. In fact, she was laughing. Of all the nerve to laugh at a time like this. “
“Oh, that didn’t hurt—it was fun!” Erin lifted her chin defiantly. Fortunately, at that time, Mom called us in for supper. We trudged into the house with our wet clothes; Erin was laughing at how silly she must have looked, but I was still perturbed that Erin found the situation funny.
Since Erin could hardly move her neck the next morning, we took her to the doctor where we found out that her neck was sprained. In fact, she had to refrain from physical activity for a while. I knew it couldn’t be funny!
That trauma has affected me to this day. So when I see someone doing something dangerous (particularly something that would injure their neck), like Olivia’s jumping on the bed, I get a little concerned. And once in a while, I laugh at the picture of Erin’s head getting stuck in the snow—after all, it was a little funny.
