From 365 Days of Photos 2010

After finishing work today, I walked down to the village’s skating rink and spent about 45 minutes skating in circles. I haven’t skated in about 2 years and it took a few minutes to get my feet under me. It was sleeting and windy, but I was a quite warm and enjoyed having the rink to myself.

When I was a kid we spent a good part of our winters on skates. We’d skate on frozen puddles in the fields, or even better, the big rink my parents would build in the driveway. First we’d level the snow and pack it down. Then we’d start sprinkling it with water, slowly building layer on layer until the ice was thick enough to skate on.

Of course, we didn’t have much in the way of ice making equipment beyond a hose and a few shovels. If we were lucky, we’d have a cutter (horse drawn sleigh) with metal runners. We’d push and pull it around, loaded with neighbourhood kids, to help knock off the large bumps in the ice. It would take days and days of skating down the bumps, watering and shoveling to finally get an smooth surface.

We’d spend hours skating, getting up early in the morning to skate before breakfast, coming in only for meals. The yard light provide night skating and weekends we’d skate long after dark. It was special treat to be able to stay up late on weekends and skate way beyond our normal bedtimes. We’d skate early in the morning before school, and again when we returned home.

Of course we played hockey. We’d use old tobacco slats–the 4 ft long thin pieces of wood tobacco was sewn too to cure, attached to cheap plastic hockey blades.  And yes, we’d use horse manure for pucks, or old rubber balls, or sometimes a real hockey puck until it got lost in a snow bank, or anything else vaguely puck shaped. I don’t think we ever had a real net. We used pairs of boots or buckets–or whatever else we could find. Nor did we have any real hockey equipment. And there were definitely house rules–like if you saw a car out on the highway, play stopped, you had to scream CAR! and throw yourself in a snowbank.

We curled too. We wore skates of course,  used an old frozen squash or pumpkin dug out of the snow for a rock and any old brooms from the house or barn. The game usually ended with the ‘rock’ deteriorating in fibrous bits and seeds all over the ice. We also played games like fox and goose. This was best with a few inches of snow on the ice so it was easy to shovel out a circle with two lines crisscrossing the center. The ‘fox’ stayed on the two lines, but the geese could escape by skating on the outer circle. If a goose strayed into the center, the fox would try to catch them. Of course a goose that was caught would become the new fox.

It was also fun to shovel mazes through the snow and it made clearing the ice more interesting. We didn’t have a snowblower, but with a crowd of kids, it was never a odious job. Maintaining the ice was a job we enjoyed. I can remember standing out in -20C, spraying the ice with the garden hose as a coating of ice built up on my boots and pantlegs. Steam would rise from the ice before the water froze and in the early morning the only sounds were the hiss of the sprayer and a few crows or chickadees calling.

Today I remembered the feeling you get after you take off your skates–you feel closer to the ground, flat footed and short strided. I remembered to put the tops of my snowboots down wind so they wouldn’t fill with blowing snow. And I wished I had a shovel and a garden hose. That ice could have used a little work.