Another beautiful day with plenty of sunshine. Although it was freezing outside once again, the coming week promises to be a little more forgiving. It’ll be interesting to see the progress or lack thereof with the ice filling in over the next few days.
This is a storm water management pond about a mile and a half from the house. It’s on the opposite side of the road to the lake. As you can perhaps imagine, it’s usually the first body of water to freeze in this area. This morning, before it came into view, I could hear a familiar sound of a winter in Canada...skates on ice! There was an older chap skating around and I have to say, he had some rather fancy moves.
I never did learn to skate; I suppose that could be from growing up in the United Kingdom. I only remember one winter where we had enough snow to play in and build a snowman. We did use to head over to Nottinghamshire on a few occasions for roller skating, I couldn’t manage that either. In the late 1970’s I lived in Sweden for a time, just outside Stockholm. I was a nanny to three amazing children (who are now grown with families of their own and to this day, I count as part of my family). We lived on a lake then too and I recall on winter afternoons, us all clambering up ‘the rock’ in the back garden to get to the lake. I tried to get the hang of skating there too, but to no avail. My memories of those adventures were of the incredibly loud booms of ice cracking as the children skated and I seemed to be the only one concerned.
When living at our previous home where our two children grew up, we did the skating rink thing in the back garden for a number of years, which also happened to back on to a storm management pond. Our first rink was created in the mud of the garden it was eventually to become. It had little mud mountains that the children expertly cornered and at some speed I might add. The love of this activity eventually lead to our son becoming enthralled with the sport of figure skating. As a pre-teen he practiced for endless hours either on the ice at the indoor rink or on roller-blades on the driveway and he became good, in fact really good. His coaches felt he had the potential to aim towards competing in an Olympic Games, he was driven and focused at such an early age.
And then before we knew it everything changed. His hockey playing peers got wind of the sport that had claimed his heart and began a relentless barrage of bullying. Long story short, our son felt that he could not continue on. It sickens and saddens me to this day that a child could be subjected to such an awful experience. I sometimes wonder what might have been had he felt he could continue on. I think it was such a traumatic experience that even to this day, I think he might have lost sight of the raw talent he had and very rarely skates now. Wow…that was tucked away in a memory drawer.
Now I need a little sunset love after that. The ferry dock is just a few seconds from the house. This is almost the same view as last night, except that I included a corner of one of the rafts used to transport building equipment of other heavy items out to one of the two islands just opposite our home. The ferry has long since been taken out of the lake for the season but I’m guessing these will remain.