Twice The Ice

Had it ever truly frozen, it would have been my very first skating rink. I spent weeks trying to build that flat piece of ice. I imagined myself gliding gracefully across its surface. Crosscutting over its length. Inch by inch, I trampled snow with my feet to create a base for the ice. To build up the banks which serve to hold in the water, I harvested snow from far and wide. Many times in the darkness of night, I stretched out a garden hose to water the nascent ice… Day in and day out amidst fluctuating temperatures, I worked on my baby. I worked hard. I was determined to make me a rink. But the warm days only got warmer. On those days, I struggled to gather snow to throw on top of the softening mass to protect it from the killing rays of the sun. As it turned out, it didn’t stand a chance. My precious creation died before it was ever truly born. A failure, it was. Fully and completely. Mother Nature was in no mood; winter wasn’t happening. I was heart-broken. I shed real tears over it, actually. I seriously questioned if I’d ever attempt ice rink-making again. All that work! And for what? A pathetic behemoth of a slush-puddle, and not a lick of skating.

But that was last year.

This year in a truly astonishing reversal of fortune, an ice rink materialized in the exact location of last year’s disaster… God’s honest truth, a large swath of beautifully flat, perfect ice appeared after a few tiny days of rain followed by a cold snap. Coincidental? Maybe… Or maybe Mother Nature felt bad about last year’s slush-ridden fiasco and decided I deserved my very very own, ready-to-serve, gorgeous ice rink. Or maybe she gave me this fully-prepared skating surface to avoid having to witness my ice-making incompetency two years running. I don’t know. Either way, I am just dazzled by the whole darn thing.