Ice

Today, Lily and I went ice skating, she for the first time, me for the first time in, oh, about twenty-some-odd years. There is a lot to say about this experience, from Lily's excited anticipation to the inevitable disappointment when it turned out to be not just harder but also different than what she'd expected. "I thought the ice would be different," she kept saying. "I didn't expect it to be so slippery." And my own initial strangeness on skates, and then gradual easing into the motions that used to be automatic. And Lily's admission hours later at dinner that she didn't want to go ice skating again. It was too hard; she only wanted to do things she was "really good at." And the pit in my stomach at this--oh, again, bells of recognition--and the subsequent conversation about how absolutely essential it is to do things that are hard, that you don't know how to do, to fail, to never be afraid to fail, again and again sometimes, because it is in the effort that we discover who and what we are.

But instead, I want to write about the two memories this afternoon on ice evoked for me. One was of an afternoon spent skating on the pond across the street from my grandmother's house with my sister and three cousins, no grown-ups, so we must have been in our early teens. We had hockey sticks and wool hats, our own worn-in skates, and the promise of hot chocolate after an hour or so of racing around in the bitter cold. I remember the scene not from this specific day, as our skating was not a one-time occurrence, but from a number of similar days combined. But I do remember a few flashes: one cousin's red cheeks and blue, blue eyes, a squirrel leaping from one tree to another, a crack in the ice, low down, the sound of it, the instant of fear, the realization of safety.

And then, a more particular memory, one of the few I hold from childhood as a perfect afternoon. The girls in my class, about eighteen of us, skating together on the small pond behind our school, skating backward, spinning, showing off. A red scarf, someone singing, the younger children watching us from a classroom window. And my parents arriving, as it was the last day before vacation, and we were going away, down south. And I saw them approaching, coming to get me, and in that moment was so perfectly happy in where I was and in where I was going that I looked up at the blue sky, cloudless, and smiled into the cold, watching a puff of breath form in front of me and then just as quickly disappear.