the toboggan

This is how you spend winter in Minnesota. Outside.  You learn the language of snow.  If it's humid, the snow is just right for making snowballs, building forts and creating snowmen.  If the air is dry, well, it's perfect for sledding.  There is a golf course down at the end of the lane near the house where we lived.  We would drag our sleds over to the golf course and slide down the hills and have a lot of fun.  One year our Dad brought home a toboggan.  Wow, we could fit all of us kids and more on one giant sled.  There were two main hills on the golf course that were used for sledding.  The "first" hill was steep and there was a good flat area at the bottom for coasting.  Then came the creek.  Yes, there was a creek bed at the end of the flat area and the goal was to get up enough steam to speed down the hill, glide across the flat bottom and, with luck, drop over the edge of the bank and into the creek.  It was winter, the water was frozen and no harm was done except to the sled or toboggan as it scraped the rocks.  Constant waxing kept the toboggan in good order for many years.  The "second" hill was a little further into the golf course but it offered a longer run down the hill and an ample coasting area.  No creek, though.  Both hills were great sledding hills and all we needed was the right temperature outside to give us the white powdery snow we needed for the ride down the hills.  We lived close enough to the golf course that as we became a little older we could go sledding without the parents.  All we had to do was make sure we told them which hill we were aiming for--first or second.  They knew what it meant.