Yesterday, when I picked up AJ from school, he requested stopping by the sledding hill. So we went home and piled on the boots and hats and sweaters and mittens and jackets and snowpants, grabbed the red sled, and hiked past the horses to the top of the steep pasture.

The beauty of sledding at 4 in the afternoon is the pile of laughing, shrieking children at the bottom of the hill, the sun setting behind the icicle-hung oaks, the moon rising over the barn.

The beauty of sledding at 11:30 on Monday morning is total silence, an empty hill with only footprints, sled tracks and the occasional snow angel to remind you of the many children who play there, the glinting of the winter sun off the sparkling snow in blinding fashion.

AJ has cataloged his favorite ways to go down the hill. There is Going Together, where I climb on first and he sits down in front while I wrap my legs around him and push off with my knuckles, like a misplaced Neanderthal. There is Going Alone, where he carefully pulls in the green tow rope, sits on it, dead center in the middle of the sled, holds onto the sides and ooches slowly forward by hopping up and down on his bottom. As he approaches the bottom of the hill, he lies down and stops by rolling over, at which point he gets up, dusts himself off, and waves at me vigorously from the bottom of the hill. There is a variation of this maneuver where I stand at the bottom of the hill instead of the top while he goes down, but it is otherwise pretty much the same thing, except that he waves vigorously before his departure instead of after his landing. But his favorite is The Race. This involves AJ going down by himself, as before, and me running along side in giant, moonwalk strides, as I attempt (unsuccessfully) to catch him and also to prevent myself from doing a face plant on the side of the steep slope. Either result produces much laughter on both sides.

This is, quite possibly, the best sledding hill in the world.

Last weekend, when we were sledding one evening as the sun went down, in the presence of a passel of bigger boys on snowboards, one of the snowboard boys, about 8 or so, stopped to watch AJ flying down the hill. He turned to me and said, �I remember when my dad used to bring me here and we�d sled together. I loved going by myself too, but I didn�t like walking up again. My dad used to come down and pull me all the way up the hill.� And then, as if to demonstrate how much he has changed, he was gone, sprinting up the side of the hill again with his snowboard.

I�m not accustomed to seeing so much nostalgia from an 8-year-old. But there�s something about the ritual of sledding that feels ancient and communal. The passage from the little kids sledding side of the hill to the snowboarders� side, which is slightly steeper and often includes kid-built snow ramps for maximum death-defiance, is an important step in a boys life.

Winter seems to breed such nostalgia. The sledding exhibition combined with my own nostalgic entry yesterday caused me to recall a New Year�s Eve while we lived in London. Our family had spent the evening with friends from Holland who lived in an adjacent neighborhood on a snowy evening � the first snowfall we�d seen since we moved to England. As we said our �Happy New Years� shortly after midnight and started to walk home, we passed by Primrose Hill park. The city was glowing orange; it was never dark, but on this night the brightness was magnified by the falling snow. We looked over at the park and saw sled after sled sailing down the hill. We stood and watched � for we had no sleds of our own � and then slid home on the sidewalks in our good shoes.

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