a tropical heat wave…

“It’s finally warm enough to go ice-skating!”

Growing up where the only ice was found in the freezer, I never thought I’d form such a sentence, let alone experience it.

Twenty-two degrees is hardly tropical, but never underestimate the power of relativity. It has been in the negatives (that means below zero, not below freezing, below zero), so this is nearly forty degrees warmer than it was two days ago. Today twenty-two degrees (ten degrees below freezing) feels quite balmy.

So our family of three decided to take advantage of this deliciously warm weather and went ice-skating. We laced up our skates in a warming house set a blaze by a roaring fire and laughing children scuttling across long wooden benches. Ava’s ankle wobbled as she stood in her skates for the first time and she grabbed her daddy’s hand as he showed her how to keep them straight.

We teetered out into the crisp night air and held onto a railing that led us down to a frozen stream. It meandered under walking bridges and glowing lamp posts. Evergreens lit up with white lights lined the ice-bound creek whose new current was shaped by shiny blades carving ripples and swirls on its surface.

Nate wrapped his hands under Ava’s shoulder and gave her her first push out on the ice. She giggled as her pair of double blades scratched their own marks into the ice.

We took turns crouching to our knees and holding out our arms, sending her to and fro as if she was a toddler charting her first steps. She kept her ankles straight up and arms straight out as she shuffled from one hug to the other.

Nate and I each took a fuchsia mitten in our own as we skated in a happy row of three. We glided together under one bridge, then another and another until we reached a large open pond. Ava shuffled over to the bank and made a seat in the snow as she watched her daddy race past me and attempt to show me how to skate in reverse. She ate mitten-made snow cones and practiced standing up on her skates, all the while enthralled by a skater making pirouette and petit jete’s across the pond.

When the rosiness in our cheeks spread to our noses, we took hands again and scraped out our goodbye to the little pond. We had only passed one bridge before Ava threw up her arms and declared her legs could take her no further. Three bridges away from the warming house, Ava had skated her last.

Nate lifted her up as I skated off in hopes of finding an abandoned sled.

I returned with a tall wooden sled with long black metal runners. Ava practiced pushing it, but her tired legs preferred being pushed on it. She made herself comfortable on the high wooden bench and leaned back to enjoy a daddy sleigh ride.

“Faster, Daddy, faster!” she cried from beneath two scarves. A flurry of ice and snow flew up behind Nate’s dark skates as he propelled her past the warming house and down the other side of the creek, leaving me with a picture of my two loves whizzing through a winter wonderland.

We passed on our sled to another little girl with tired legs, and climbed back up to the warming house. Ava and I took our place in front of the crackling logs and peeled off the layers of warmth as her daddy went in search of hot cocoa.

He returned with one and placed it in Ava’s happy hands. The moment I said, “Nate, why did you only get one,” Ava spilled it onto the slate floor and we had none. Her tears soon joined the steamy puddle sending her daddy off in search of a mop. A nearby father offered the weepy Ava a cup of cocoa from his family’s thermos and soon we had one again. Nate returned with paper towels, a custodian, and another cup of cocoa–now we had two!

After we had fully soaked in all the savory cocoa, the glowing fire, and the warm cheer from the families of mittens and hats, we stood to up to say good night. We stepped out of Currier and Ives and back into the parking ramp to find our ride home.

Come to think of it now, perhaps frozen water is balmier than a tropical heat wave.