Four years ago there was a terrible storm. Everyone’s power shut down and it was hard to find someone who didn’t have water floating in their basement. When my dad realized that there was water pouring into our basement, he shouted up from the basement that we all needed to get everything out of the basement as fast as possible. His voice echoed up to my room where, in a haze of confusion, I practically fell out of bed and sprinted to the basement. My brother who had beaten me downstairs started tossing me things telling me to put them upstairs and then return back down. “Grab as many things as possible!” kept echoing through my ears as my family frantically rushed handfuls of items to the kitchen. When no one was shouting, it sounded as if someone had left the shower on, but I soon realized that the sound was water pouring into our basement because of the storm. The assembly line continued throughout the night. We passed as many items as possible until we realized that we couldn’t salvage anything else from the water, which was as high as our ankles. We then decided that it was time to go to sleep since the water had stopped and it was useless to do anything until morning.

I slept like a rock that night and was extremely disappointed when I learned that I still had to go to school the next morning. I sleepily made it through the day and when I returned home everything that was saved from the water was split into three piles. My parents decided the flood was the perfect time to clean out the basement and decide what we really need, and what we really need to throw out. The first pile had boxes staked upon boxes of pictures, obviously the pile we were keeping. The pile next to that had toy cars, Barbies, and Legos, and boxes that had water stains on the bottom because we couldn’t get to them fast enough. To my dismay this was the throw away pile. Everything was either molding, or I hadn’t played with it in so long that it was useless to keep. Lastly, lay a pile filled with a ton of random objects; television tables, plastic chairs, and mats. I soon learned that this was the, ‘if you want it take it, otherwise it is going in the trash’ pile. I carefully hunted through the pile making sure I didn’t miss anything that I wanted to keep. I ended up taking these three huge rectangular mats out of the pile just to ensure that they were not thrown away. Yes, I know it is extremely strange to take huge mats since I haven’t even used them in a long time, but without them the sleeping bag races that my brother, sister, and I had every winter when we were younger would have never been invented.

When I was younger my brother, sister, and I had way too much energy. We were either running outside in the summer, or jumping on furniture inside during the winter. One day, my dad had these huge mats out because he was the coach of my sister’s softball team, and they were learning to slide. Since it was winter outside and there was not a flake of snow on the ground, we were trapped inside. I don’t exactly remember how or why it started, but someone decided to take all three mats and line the stairs going down into the basement with them. Everyone thought this was a brilliant idea because we were making an indoor slide, which we thought was the coolest invention since toast. At first we would run down up the mats and then slide down but we soon had to add bean bags to the bottom since we all had rug burns all over our legs and arms. We had races to see who could get to the top of the stairs first and then who could slide down the quickest. It was only possible to make to the top of the stairs if we sprinted, otherwise the mats would slide down the stairs and take us down with them. It was soon evident that we needed to find away to go way faster down the stairs. We rummaged through our crawl space until we found our pile of sleeping bags. We snapped of the strings bounding the sleeping bags together. My brother grabbed one of the sleeping bags and leaped up the stairs he made it to the top, took a deep breath, and then jumped into the sleeping bag as he started gliding down the stairs. He crashed into the beanbag lying on the bottom and I held my breath for what seemed like a minute until he rolled out of the bad and proclaimed, “THAT WAS AWESOME!” There was soon a fight for who would get to go next. There was no fair way to decide who would go next so we decided to all fit into the sleeping bag and see how fast we could go. My brother rolled up into a ball and the bottom of the sleeping bag, my sister then sat on top of him, and finally I was the one who actually got to see what was happening since I sat on the top. Also, keep in mind that I did this when my siblings and I were pretty young so we actually fit into the sleeping bag, today it would be impossible all fit in the sleeping bag since we are all way to tall. After we once again got bored of all sliding down the stairs I climbed back into the crawlspace in order to retrieve another sleeping bag. This began the infamous sleeping bag races. Two people would start at the top of the stairs, while the other person was the judge of who won the race. The winner would then play the judge, and the loser becomes the new judge, and so on. Though it’s painful to lose, it was literally painful if you lost because the first person to reach the bottom always lands on the sleeping bag, and sleeping bag is now naturally pushed to the side of the person who won, so the other contestant landed on the bare carpet, which was less than comfortable. This became a daily occurrence in our household. Everyday we would set up the mats and sleeping bags and create new games and competition.

Even though the stairs are only about twelve feet long, one of the things that I miss is being able to race my siblings down the stairs. Today if we were to race, just lying down on the stairs, we are already half way down. Though it was pretty useless to keep the mats since we have only used them three times in the past five years, I am still so glad that they were saved from the flood because now every time I go into the crawl space I get to see them and remember the best winter, of sleeping bag races.