The Snow Day

    Right as I woke up that January morning, I jumped out of bed and ran to the window. The suspense from the night before had been building up inside of me the whole night. I looked outside and saw white covering everything, ice on the streets, and a cold breeze blowing. The instant I saw it, I got a happy feeling inside of me. I just knew we weren’t going to have school. So I turned on my radio to the local radio station, which I’m sure the whole town was listening to, to find out how this day was going to turn out. Right as I turned it on, I heard the announcer listing off the schools with late starts or school called off. After about fifteen other schools went by, he finally said, "Yankton school district will have no school today".

    "Yes! We don’t have school today!" I screamed loud enough that my whole family woke up. I loved snow days. My friends and I would always call each other up after having a nice warm breakfast, bundle up in our warmest winter gear, and meet somewhere to begin our adventurous day.

    Like every snow day started, a group of about eight of my close friends met in the park, we threw a couple snowballs to see how the snow was packing together that day, then continued our way to the cemetery hill. None of us at the time could drive, and all our parents were at work, so we made due with the best we had, our feet. It must have been a two-mile walk from where we lived to the hill but it was worth it. All of us brought our best sled we had at our house and would trade on and off to see who’s was the fastest, who’s could go the farthest, and who’s was the overall best.

    After about three hours of sledding, we had worked up an appetite and were ready for a rest. We kept on our walking across Broadway, to make way to McDonalds for lunch. We took off some of our layers once we were eating and played for another hour in the brand new play place we had just gotten. It was a blast.

    Now being gone for quite a bit of the day, a lot of our friends had to go home and rest up for the next school day. But two of my good girlfriends, Ketty and Melissa, and I didn’t have to go home and we weren’t ready to go inside yet. So we went and searched for a huge snow pile, and began building a snow fort. We wanted to make a really cool fort that we could show off to everyone so we found a really big pile in the parking lot of the middle school. We started digging from two directions, hoping that they would meet somewhere and we would have a tunnel snow fort. It must have been about two hours before we were finally getting close.

    "I think I see your shovel!" Ketty exclaimed. We were so excited that it had actually worked. This was going to be the best snow fort in Yankton! Well after we had made a tunnel out of the big snow pile, we thought we needed something to make it even cooler, so we made a large area in the tunnel, enough for three young girls to sit. It had started getting dark so we figured we should go check in with our parents. Melissa’s house was about a one-minute walk away, so we just went there. We all called our parents and told them we would be home soon, but we wanted to finish our fort. Thinking of what to do, we decided it would be fun to make some hot chocolate and take a candle out to the fort and sit in the area we had made. We thought it was the best idea ever. So we took the candle, the matches, and our hot chocolate out to our snow fort. Once we got out there we all sat around our candle to keep us warm. Until Ketty accidentally blew it out, so we tried to light it again with our matches, but she had gotten those wet with the snow. So we were left in our snow fort with nothing more to keep us warm. Needless to say, we were back inside in about twenty minutes.

    I got home at about nine o’ clock that night. It was such a fun day, just doing everything with my friends. From now on, no matter how old we are, whenever we have a snow day, that same group of friends still meets in the park and then we head over to the cemetery hill to go sledding. Following our sledding adventures, Ketty, Melissa, and I make our way to Melissa’s front yard and build our famous snow fort. We will always remember the first time we did though. We were so proud of ourselves.