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RED KEVIN
& THE SPRING
SNOW DAY
BY A. A. AUGUSTINE

    Well, another day has come and gone here in Ebenezer’s Woods and what a day it was...
    While it may be the middle of Spring, we all awoke to three feet of heavy, wet snow this morning in the Southtowns.
    Sure, that type of heavy snow is great for making snowmen and snowball fights, but it’s heck on the back and knees.
    Of course, the kids were delighted and the adults as chagrined as they should be.
    You could hear the sighs of another long, cold winter that won’t leave us alone coming from the bent, arched backs of the stodgy, woolen-headed herds of homeowners as they twisted and contorted their way through the mass of heavy white.
  The shovels were just as worn-out as the humans since they were more than likely used and abused through months of continual digging, and now, when needed for one-last-time they were failing miserably with bursting rivets and busting handles.
    The curses of the stodgy, neighborhood woolen-headed herd could be heard for blocks away as they pushed dutifully against the ever-encroaching onslaught of the deep, heavy wetness.
    Of course, none of them were taking into account that the plow hasn’t even been attached to the town’s lone old pick-up truck that masqueraded as the snowplow.    
    No one also into account that Joe the plow guy is now down in Bocca for the Spring and Summer and isn’t due back until next Fall. So without plows and Joe to plow the streets, it was gonna be one messy day.
    Sure, Buddy the grave digger has been known to do the job on the odd day Joe couldn’t, but Buddy is mostly drunk at this time of the morning and no one wants to deal with that. Especially today.
    It was just gonna have to be a long, hard collective push for a few hours.
    On the other hand, the kids seemed to adjust quickly and set in with their usual joyful abandon on what was hopefully, the last snow day of the year. They celebrated their day off by rampaging around the neighborhood, building snow forts, tunnels, ice bridges and generally losing their little minds at the thought of a day of complete freedom with little to no parental supervision as their parents had problems of their own just getting out of the house and getting to work.
    The good thing about living in a place as small as Ebenezer’s  Woods is that if you can’t drive to work, you can walk as most of us live no more than a mile away from our jobs on or near Main Street.
    But, on days like today with school being closed, neighbor helping neighbor, kids being kids and our entire volunteer fire department and town’s crews composed of the same guys and gals who were currently indisposed and were digging themselves out, well, we just hoped no one would be in true trouble and in need of real help.
    Of course, to make matters worse, we soon heard word that Joe took the keys for the garage we keep the plow in to Bocca with him and forgot to return them when he got down there. So no plows today and by 8 a.m. the town had already turned into a hot… er… cold, slippery mess.
    Thankfully, we didn’t have any serious injuries or kids missing or the usual domestic issues, but the tweens and teens rained heck down on the town all day and created nothing but trouble.
    First, the Peterman boys decided that since it was now officially hockey season and their cheap, Wally World issue above-ground pool was frozen enough to stand on, they could get a quick pick-up ice hockey game on a pool that even on a good day couldn’t hold more than 3 or 4 kids and today they had a good half dozen on it.
    Needless to say, within minutes, the sides exploded and collapsed releasing all of the water into not only the Peterman’s yard and flooding their basement, but also their neighbors, the Gandys.
    Now, not knowing the Hatfield/McCoy feud that’s been going on between the Gandys and Petermans for the last decade, you may think, well, that’s horrible but I’m sure they could help one another and bail out their basements together. But an incident like this, on a day like today, was like pouring gas on an inferno.
    Before you knew it, Mr. Peterman and Mr. Gandy were body-locked and screaming at one another in a newly minted mound of snow at the foot of the Peterman’s driveway. Each vowed imminent, sudden death to one another until the kids had to call Big Tom down at the Sheriff station to come over to help get them separated, calmed down and taken into their respective houses to begin the long and arduous job of bailing out icy cold water from their respective cellars.
    Then, not even an hour later, a group of tweens who went down to the old sledding hill were having a huge issue all of their own with a kid they called “Red Kevin.”
    Now, as far as us adults know, the kids are individually intimated by Red Kevin, but collectively they beat up on the poor kid and are always setting him up like Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football.
    The word around town, retold straight off a police scanner, was that the kids convinced Red Kevin to take the Mud Popsicle jump down at the sledding hill.    The sledding hill has been around since the town was initially settled by Old Man Ebenezer and is essentially a large hill leading up from the creek bed to the farm fields that was just wide enough to accommodate Old Man Ebenezer’s tractor.    
    The hill was natural, but Ebenezer cleared it while also re-routing an upper farm field stream to wind down into a pool he created next to the hill for his cattle to drink from when he’d run them from one pasture to the next as they took the short cut along the creek and up the hill to the main pastures and barn.
    Now, since it hadn’t been maintained for almost 100 years, what was once a tidy little drinking pool had since turned into what resembled a small, mud-’n-cocktail-reed-engulfed pond.
    Local folklore has it that one not-so-bright kid, generations before mine even, had made the ramp-like dirt detour on the way down that abruptly ends at the edge of the drinking pond so if a sledder gains enough momentum going down the hill they can “switch lanes” so to speak, and take the Mud Popsicle Run detour, tempt fate and see if they could make it airborne over the drinking pond.
    The trouble is, most kids didn't have a fast enough sled to cover the distance and sure enough, every year, one or two gullible kids would get egged on and triple-dog-dared just enough to get up the nerve to try to make the jump and not end up as that season’s Mud Popsicles.
    Inevitably, every year, we’d have to rescue a few embarrassed, frozen and “would never live long enough to live this down” kid from completely sinking into the partially frozen mud.
    You see, the pond was only a few feet deep and still fed with running water that ran through it, so it never had the chance to ever properly freeze. And every winter it would just turn into one heck of a thick, soupy, muddy mess.
    And yes, this season’s last victim was poor Red Kevin
    Thankfully, he wasn’t really hurt and didn’t make it more than a few feet into the muck before becoming trapped up to his waistline in the stuff and was pretty startled, shaken-up and yes… as bright red as a freshly painted barn by the time we got there.
    In the end, we may have been able to save him from the thick, stinky mud bog, but there was nothing we could do to save him from the kids that were there and their much-maligned tales that would inevitably spread and further perpetuate the poor kids already “marked” reputation.
    But kids will be kids and it was just another day in old Eb’s Woods. ~AA