Family Friday Tales: Sledding Accident

 Once upon a time, a long time ago...probably about the winter of 1956...there was an accident on our farm.

As children we had the run of the farm.  Our parents were dairy farmers with a growing family.  At that point my older brother and I and our next younger brother were old enough to go sliding by ourselves in the winter.  Our house sat at a nice flat spot after a longish straight road.  The road then curved sharply and went on up the hill to the neighbors' house about three-quarters of a mile above us.

We loved to go up that road a little bit, turn around and throw ourselves onto our sleds and race down the hill and turn down onto the  flat in front of the house.  This worked pretty well for those of us with the long sleds, but the younger brother had a half-sized sled so he was forced to sit up on it and steer the mechanism with his feet, unlike our older brother and I who could yank on the steering mechanism with our hands.  There was nothing like the exhilaration of lying on our bellies on our sleds, steering with all our mights as we careened down that hill with the wind in our faces, and sometimes a little bit of ice crystals that whipped up from the sled in front of us.

This sledding and steering  worked very well.  Until one day!  One day, the day in question, E was sitting on his sled after hauling it up quite a way up the road toward the neighbors' house.  He sat on the sled and came barreling down the road.  He was going too fast to turn the sled enough as he approached the house.  He ran into a grease fitting on the front  of the little green Jeep that was parked in front of the house. He hit just right so he was not blinded but did have a scar ever after on his eyelid.

Older brother and I had already come to a stop and had turned back up the road in time to watch the debacle.  Fortunately there was only blood involved.  The accident did not stop the sledding.