Winter is Coming. React.

I woke up one December morning a few winters ago to several centimetres of fresh, fluffy snow outside waiting to be flattened. By the afternoon, the message had gotten around to all of my friends: meet at the hill by 8, and bring your crazy carpet. We've gone tobogganing on the hill by Kaitlyn's house many times, and it still seems perfect: one side is covered in trees, but the other has a steep slope that can tear the scream from your throat as you take the plunge off the edge of the top ridge. Going later at night means that there are less young children to watch out for, and the darkness always adds an extra source of fanciful danger.

Seven of us gathered at the top of the hill and stalled, waiting for someone to take the first ride. I grabbed Jessica's sled and dived off the top, yelling gleefully all the way down, and a few others followed. As always, after a few trips we needed to find ways to spice up the experience. I think we managed to get 4 people to dog-pile on to one sled and get all the way down the hill. Of course, every time we failed, bailing into the soft snow all around was a pleasant alternative.

The hill averages about a 15 second slide down, and naturally, the walk up feels longer and longer the more times you go down. After about an hour, we were all exhausted, a bit cold, and ready to head back to Kaitlyn's for some hot chocolate. While I was laying on one of the sleds at the top of the hill waiting for the boys to come back from the bottom, I made some snarky comment as per usual. I can't remember what it was now, but the minute following has been permanently burned into my brain. In retaliation for my sass, Kaitlyn pushed me playfully, and I started going down the wrong side of the hill. It seemed safe enough, so I flipped onto my stomach and looked up, leaning my body from side to side so as to direct myself around the trees to the bottom. I could hear Jessica asking what the hell I was doing, but I didn't stop. I kept going, feeling like I was in a dumbed down version of Skeleton. I was doing very well, and as my head made it past the last tree I whooped excitedly.. before my knee and the tree became one and next thing I knew, I was laying crumpled at the bottom of the hill, laughing at my stupidity and crying over the pain in my knee. Hearing my laughter, my friends didn't run down but slowly descended to see how I was. It wasn't broken, but most definitely bruised.

On the trek back to Kaitlyn's, I could barely walk and I wished I hadn't of brushed off my injury to my friends so I could've had a bit more sympathy for my adrenaline-reduced pain. For the week after the accident, I wore a tensor around my knee so I could walk without my right leg buckling. It felt like a cruel punishment for my stupidity (or maybe just lack of coordination when manoeuvring around trees) that I had to deal with the pain for such an extended amount of time. When it happened I thought my knee would only be really sore for the next day, or maybe two. In what seemed like an endless saga, it continued to twinge for a month after I hit it on the hill, and I figured I must have seriously damaged some cartilage. Even in the summer I could still feel my right knee move around, looser than the left one in some medical way I've never understood. It was July, and while I wanted to think only of sunshine and of star gazing in my T-shirt at midnight on luscious green grass, my knee constantly reminded me of the hill, the snow, and how the three of us would meet again in December.