This morning we joined my parents and a couple of my sisters for our monthly family breakfast. While we were finishing our coffee, Mom pulled out her iPad and showed me a picture she’d taken of a photograph that had somehow unearthed itself. What a treasure!
You see, back in the good old days when I was about twelve years old, a weather combination happened that resulted in pure magic for us kids. Without photo evidence it might be hard for some to believe.
As you can see in this picture, the fields are fully snow-covered, as they usually were back then. There had been a thaw for a couple of days before this photo was taken but that didn’t affect the snow, except to make it settle, firm and compact. The unusual warmth was followed by a flash freeze, hardening the snow cover, and the weather trifecta was complete when freezing rain followed.
The freezing rain happened to fall on the day our small country school’s annual skating party at Cedarena. Although we anxiously waited for the school bus to pick us up, it never arrived. Not knowing that, our brave teacher, Miss Anderson, started out from her home and headed to school. About halfway there, her little red VW bug slid off the road. Undaunted, she grabbed her skates, skated around to her students’ homes, and we had a skating party on the ice-covered roads.
When the freezing rain stopped and the sanding trucks came around, our road-rink was unusable, but we discovered some more magic. The icy rain that turned the roads to ice also covered the firmly packed, snowy fields and they were frozen solid. Our hundred acre farm was a huge skating rink. As I recall, and my mother confirms this, we were able to come home from school for the next week or so, tie on our skates, and glide over the fields until dark.
I’ve often wished this magical time could have be repeated. The weather has occasionally come close, and when conditions start to mimic the ones I’ve described above I cross my fingers, hoping. Sadly, it’s never been quite like it was all those years ago, when we had our school skating party on the roads north of the Toronto zoo (which didn’t exist then) all those years ago.
Once upon a time, a workbench lived in my father’s woodworking shop. It was an ordinary bench, extraordinary only because of the projects built on its surface. I’ve lost count of the number of things Dad made, but his grandchildren will never forget building their own little projects with Grandpa’s guidance. At first they built small boats to sail on the river running behind Grandpa and Grandma’s property. Then they graduated to wooden mallets, and small baseball bats turned on the lathe. Always, there were small pieces of wood available to them — cutoffs from other projects — and a box of used nails they could help themselves to. 
