We were all by ourselves at dusk along the river, just a few blocks from home. We'd walked as far as the path would go, and there we saw a place where a field had flooded and frozen and I went out to investigate the ice: just a few inches thick, but wide and unscarred. I could smell memories: the inside of hockey gloves; inevitable hot chocolate. We came back the next day with our skates.
The boy is still too small for skating, so the poor thing had to settle for scuttling along in his boots, and those moments where I'd scoop him up and charge across the ice, setting his feet down to glide while he cackled.
No one hassled us; we didn't see another soul. We've gone to the public rink downtown several times, but with gangling teens learning to skate by gripping the boards and swinging their blades face-level to a four-year-old, this trespass was markedly safer. It's one of the benefits of living here: sometimes there's just nobody around to say you can't do something.
