Thursday, May 29, 2008

Winter Wonderland

by Christopher Rivera

When I was growing up in The Bronx, I lived on this one block long street, (Torry Ave) which for the most part was completely devoid of traffic. I have so many memories of all the neighborhood kids just hanging out in the street, playing kickball, dodge ball, tag, all those stupid games kids used to play and not having to worry about a constant stream of cars passing by interrupting our fun.

The best memory I have growing up there was one winter, I had to have been maybe 7 or 8, and we have this vicious snowstorm. Not the crap we have today and have the nerve to call a snowstorm. I'm talking about 3 to 4 feet of snow coming down and just blanketing the neighborhood. It was a kids dream come true. Anyway as you can image our little dead street was even more quite then before without a single car passing by, the perfect time for a neighborhood snowball fight.

But of course being kids we couldn't just have any old snowball fight. We had to have the snowball fight to end all snowball fights and so we decided we were going to play capture the flag. All of us kids divided into groups and we went about preparing ourselves for all out war. Forts were created, and not just little mounds of snow forts either. These were massive structures standing at least 6 or 7 feet (at least that's what I remember) with secret tunnels into and out of them, defensive towers where we could repel the invading army and an armory full of perfectly shaped snowballs ready to be thrown. It was every kids dream.

I couldn't tell you what happened that day other then a complete and total cluster fuck of kids trying to kill each other in the ultimate snowball war. I do remember crawling through tunnels, trying to get to the nearest stash of snowballs so I could get back at the kid who just hit me. And climbing atop of one of the ledges and just hurling snowball after snowball at the kids who were coming to try and invade our castle.

It was one of the greatest days of my childhood and probably the best winter I can remember. I wish for once it would snow like that again and the city would shutdown and kids could go out and be kids again.