A Snowball Fight Of Legend
Long ago, when I was but a kelp frond sprout, I engaged in a serious amount of snow tinged frivolity. The fact that I lived up north in Alaska probably had something to do with that fact, as if one didn't go out into the snow one just didn't go outside. Many of my days were spent chucking snowballs and being sacked playing quarterback in snow football games.
Anyway, as I have gotten older something horrid has evolved, I have gotten boring. By the time I get through all my chores and to dos and responsibilities for the day, I just don't seem to have any energy to take part in the fun things that I loved so much as a kid. I mean, I would go for hours! When we lived in the little logging camp turned into town of Thorne Bay, Alaska, I would sometimes spend upwards of ten to twelve hours a day running the town in an entire town snowball fight, only pausing to refill with food and drink. Often I would only be clad in a pair of gloves, t-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. How I long for those days when I was impervious to the cold!
That said, the day before yesterday we got 3 inches of perfect for snowballs, wet spring snow. An interesting side effect of social distancing is that I am down to just one job instead of four, and this strange phenomena has been occurring, I have energy! Not only that, but my mischief meter has refilled and has been tapping on my conscious at random intervals. My daughter was at the kitchen counter finishing up a sandwich when I spied a ghillie suit clad heathen run by my dining room window. My son and the neighbor boys were having their daily air soft war engagement. My mischief meter pinged, I looked at my daughter with a raised eyebrow and said, "get your gloves girl!"
Out the door we went, and I felt my snowball muscle memory click into place, My first stop was at the flatbed of my pickup truck Rufus. I quickly compressed an arsenal of ammo, a stack of nicely formed snowballs of head smacking doom. My daughter, a creature whom is referred to as The Hatchet by her teachers, started chuckling maniacally as she started her descent into berserker mode. It's not her fault, she grew up surrounded by boys, 16 of them, it changed her.
"Attack!" I bellowed and let a snowball fly in the direction of my bufforilla sized son. At thirteen he stands 5'11" and weighs a blistering 215 pounds of weight-trained and football field shaped excellence. My snowball exploded across his chest as a resounding opening shot, and thus the battle began.
We quickly split into teams of four against two, with my son and our neighbor's eldest boy on Team Pumba as I christened them. They earned this moniker as they were a bunch of yellow bellied run away from the battle cowards. Both of them took off trotting like they had a digestive disturbance and were trying to find the nearest porta potty. Little did they know that I take Rule # 1 to heart. Hello cardio!
My team, Team Simba, chased the two heathens through the back ten acres of my farm, a warren of pine trees and random battlement ruins that have been constructed by my offspring and the neighbor heathens over the years. It was as I was leaping over the pungy stick fortifications that surround Fort Cankles that I began to think a new strategy was going to be required in order to massacre the members of Team Pumba.
So far, my team had taken only minor hits. J had hit me in the back of the head once with a sneak attack while I was engaged in a flurry attack with my son, but I returned the favor ten fold as I downed him with a well placed ice ball below the knee while he was running away like the squealing pork rind that he is.
The two members of Team Pumba decided to run up the hill at the back of my property, a two hundred feet straight up wall currently covered in fir trees and snow. The other members of my team were right behind them in rapid pursuit, but I held up for a second to catch my breath. At that point I had probably ran a couple of miles, and even though I am in reasonably good shape, I definitely needed a bit of a breather. Also, I wanted to take a moment and listen. It became pretty obvious that the two boys were going to go east across the ridge line and drop onto the road to circle back up by our house. Alrighty then.
As the two louder than a couple of rutting hippos members of Team Pumba worked their way across the ridge, I leisurely walked down the road that separates my shooting range from the hillside. My husband, over the years, has built up earthen walls around our shooting range, berms of protection, and I walked toward the one at the bottom of the hill. It stands right next to the road that leads back to our house from the range.
I crouched into a stance of stealth and began making a pile of snowballs. To my right the sound of crunching snow drew my attention, and I smiled as I saw my daughter emerge from the range dividing road. She had had the same idea I did. The other two members of our team, B and L, were pushing Team Pumba right into our killing lane.
My daughter and I crouched next to the snow covered berm, both of us pumped to enact a bit of snow carnage. My over confident son's voice could be heard drawing closer as he and J slid down the embankment to the range road. They still thought we were all behind them, laboring to get up the steep hillside. Closer and closer they came, I had told my girl to wait until they were right next to us, and as soon as I saw the red and white of my son's Adidas, I stood up and let my snowballs fly.
It was a white washing massacre of supreme excellence. My son and J yelped and tried to run away. My daughter Xena screamed and tackled J, she began bathing his weak carcass in massive amounts of snow as I kept firing snowballs at my son like a little hobbit armed with a winterized Gatling gun of infinite ammo proportions. In this particular case patience and experience definitely paid off.
Eventually the two members of Team Pumba escaped our assault, but we didn't even give chase. Instead my girl and I sauntered home with all the swagger of a group of stud muffin field mice. The teen boys did what teen boys always do and tried to make light of our great victory. I couldn't hear them though, for I don't speak loser.