What do kids do when puddles suddenly grow a skin? They slide on them. My German childhood winters were cold enough to have ponds frozen with a solid skin of ice. Solid enough to last us for sliding to our hearts’ delight and, later, for ice skating. I remember even walking miles to a pond in later years, where a specific area was dedicated to our amateur ice hockey games. Indeed, I became the proud owner of skates when I was around twelve. Beautiful ones that were meant for figure skating. I never learned the art of that. Instead, as a fan of Eric and Beth Heiden’s speed skating, I tried to imitate them on our local training facility’s rink.
My feet have long outgrown these skates. It’s been decades since I last stood on skates, that time wobbly and way less daring than I used to be. Maybe I should give it another try at Sprinker Recreation Center or Tollefson Plaza once more. With a larger-than-life size penguin to cling on to.
I grew up in Michigan where we had ice skating all winter. My first skates had two blades as I was four-years-old. We lived near a large lagoon where the ice froze flat, not rippled from the wind like the nearby great lake. The boys played ice hockey and the girls practiced figure skating, trying to look like the skating stars of the 1940s. At school, part of the playground was flooded and froze so we could skate during recess. We skated until we had to listen for cracks in the thick ice when it began to thaw.
What wonderful memories to share! Thank you, Jan. Our German ponds/lakes were monitored by the authorities – those areas with ice too thin were even taped off!