The Great Escape

How do you feel when you help build your first snow man or get into your first snow ball fight past the age of thirty?
Simple!
You feel exactly the same as you would have felt if you were eight years old.

This is something I discovered only a couple of days ago when the family went to spend the weekend at a hill station.
To be honest it was not the snow ball fight or even the snow man that elated me. It was the thrill of doing something that I had never done before.
I seem to remember a commercial (though I can’t recall what was being promoted) that asked viewers,
“When was the last time you did something for the first time?”
I had always been dismayed to note that my last time was too long ago. So long ago that I could barely recall the when and what parts of it. Life had settled into a boring routine where you keep on repeating the same actions and activities day after day.

But this week end all that changed.

I did a number of things that I had never done before. Even if that was walking in freezing temperature at 1:00 AM in the morning, just to find out how magnificent the dark deserted road edged with a thick snowy border looked like under the stars.
Despite the bitter cold there was some magic present that kept me and my niece from returning to the warmth of our beds inside. (If the sentry, at the military check post that we passed by, thought of us as two demented females who had lost there minds to be out walking at that hour he was too polite to voice his opinion).

I had never realized before how mesmerizing and beautiful a patch of virgin snow could be, unblemished by human footprints the snow lay smooth and silken to look at. Only God could have sprinkled with such perfection.

Whether it was the absence of honking horns and traffic noise, the old architecture of the army house we stayed in or the fast pace of our lives which had suddenly decelerated for the weekend that made me feel as if I had gone back in time, I will never know . But I felt as if I was transported to a colonial period described in one of the epic novels that I am so fond of reading.
Well what ever it was, I had a great weekend and if I am not mistaken, so did the rest of the family.
I think there should be frequent first times in every ones life.