I grew up on Woodland Avenue in Maywood, New Jersey, a few miles west of where I am now in New York City. 
The street was unremarkable, except when it snowed. Then the town would often block it off, so kids could sled on it. It wasn’t a big hill — just an ideal one for sledding: steep at the top, with a long glide path. With a good start you could ride your Flexible Flyer down past Garden, Cole and Elm Streets, all the way to Cole’s Brook. On the other side of that was Borg’s Woods, which was then owned by the Borg Family, which owned The Record, Bergen County’s afternoon paper. The Borgs had a steep back yard behind their house on Summit Avenue in Hackensack, and kindly encouraged neighborhood kids to sled there too.
So snow was a big deal for us, and still is for me. I love it. Alas, too often Winter forecasts in New York go like this: “Snow, mixed with, and changing to rain.” These days this is called, euphemistically, “wintry mix.”
Well, that’s what happened today in New York. We had a beautiful snowy day before it turned into rain and worse. For the last hour or so we’ve also had lightning, thunder and hail. The result is thick white slop, atop the frozen and half-thawed mess left over from the last storm. Here is how it looks right now at Weather.com:
I am sure there are kids in Maywood (and all over the East Coast) who wish the snow didn’t turn to slush today. My inner kid knows how they feel. (I’m also hoping my grandkids in Baltimore fared better. They got a bunch of snow today too — I think with less rain.)
By the way, our main family sled was an old-school Flexible Flyer that looked like the one above, only a bit longer. It could seat three or four kids. And nobody ever wore helmets.
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