Winter in Iowa seems to last forever especially the older you get. As a kid though you almost never want it to end with all the snow ball fights to be had, snow forts to be built (and iced down) and sledding to be done.
We used to get a lot of practice in all of those categories across the street from our house. We grew up kitty corner to what was the high school at the time and it had a huge black top playground so when it snowed they had to plow it all off and they'd put all that lovely white stuff into one gigantic row of a pile along the furthest southern edge of the playground which had a hill to the other side so it made for some great yet slightly dangerous sledding because at after the sidewalk at the bottom of the hill was the street. Even better than the sledding there was the monstrous snow forts you could build by tunneling in and through these piles of snow.
We would get off the bus and race straight to our designated spot so we could defend our ground against other neighborhood kids. At times it seemed like a scene straight out of A Christmas Story. No not the one where they stuck their tongue to a metal pole...though I have seen that happen on the baseball backstop at that very playground but more so along the lines of the snowball fight and subsequent beat down of the bully. There were many a day where we were probably minutes away from frostbite because we would stay out there so long and we didn't have any Under Armour to keep us warm or Gore Tex lined snow boots to keep us dry. We were men's men, hard core, die hard winter loving kids who nowadays hate these long winters with a passion. It's funny what a few years and a little retrospect will do for your perspective today.
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