Good Ice

Yesterday we had a sleeting, rainy, and icy afternoon, which basically shut Durham down.  Schools got let out early, people left work in the middle of the day and parties were canceled.  Even the mall closed at five in the afternoon.  Panic set in from those people who did not have dinner purchased before noon because even pizza deliveries were suspended.

I was prepared because I had bought pork chops to make for a neighbor who had lost a loved one and deserved to have dinner delivered.  After making the pork with balsamic glazed pears and onions, roast green beans and risottoed farrow I put it all in a bag along with a loaf of zucchini bread from the freezer and set out to skate my way down the street to deliver it.

As grains of frozen ice resembling grape nuts more than snow came down around me as I slid down the hill from my house to my neighbors I had flashbacks of childhood winters in Connecticut.  So many winter days would my sisters and I have to shuffle our way up our icy driveway and down our busy road to the school bus stop.  This granulated precipitation was the kind we hated.  Certainly not because it made the roads more treacherous or because it was the hardest to shovel.  We hated it because it ruined the glass like frozen surface of our ice skating pond.

When you grew up in the pre-global warming winter wonderland of Connecticut you had to embrace winter full on.  We were very lucky to have a big ice skating pond at our house that my father kept in good condition since he had no grass to cut during the winter months.  Keeping up an outdoor rink involved shoveling, or in my father’s case, snow blowing the surface the second that snow fell on the ice.  The best ice was black ice, which meant that it had frozen quickly and for a long time without any snow or melting and refreezing.

Our pond was private, as opposed to the big town lakes where many people came to skate.  The good thing about having a private pond was the fewer people skating on your ice, the nicer the surface was.  Too many skaters put dings and marks in the ice from their toe picks on the front of their figure skates.

My father also created a system of resurfacing the ice by putting a gutter from the stream that fed the pond onto the top of the ice’s surface overnight so that new water was recoating the top.  In the morning he would take the gutter off and the ice would freeze hard while we were at school.

This winter wonderland of a pond made us very popular on the school bus.  Kids would saddle up to me on the way home and hint at wanting an invitation to come skating on our newly surfaced ice.  Having just the right number of kids to play whip was the ideal afternoon activity.  We just had to make sure that the boys we invited would not get too rough and put a small child on the end of the line skating around in a giant circle until the last could not hold on any longer and would go hurdling off the end at twenty miles per hour.

I am no longer a fearless skater.  Fear of falling and lack of practice has zapped me of what was my daily winter pastime.  I am happy not to live in such cold weather now and just enjoy the memories of our great pond and the time spent gliding along its perfect surface.