On Frozen Blog

Inland water seeking its ocean, rivers, streams, and occasionally even troughs are in constant motion, and so when in our region nature, with a hard freeze, halts their movements, I’ve ever regarded it as a call to halt life’s regular motion — of work, chores, and regular leisure — and replace it with life’s greatest: legs churning, bladed bursts and glidings, arms rising in salute of shinny scores. Our present blessed freeze is in its infancy, but its vista transforming effects are already postcard-worthy. On Monday I halted my routine to share an extended weekend with my father, whose post-retirement home rests on a gentle slope overlooking a tributary of the Miles River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Yesterday morning we sipped coffee together while perusing newspapers, regularly distracted by the novel beauty outside his patio windows of a perfectly formed frozen waterway meandering for miles down by the dock.

I cannot tell you where or when he first took me pond skating as a youth — my memories of our hockey-related journeys are too cluttered in their volume — but as father and son in 1970s and ’80s Washington we were among the first to the freshly frozen Canal, Reflecting Pool, or Blue Ridge Mountain pond on frosty winter weekends.

After coffee yesterday we ran errands made marvelous on a Monday morning by the slow routine of shore life, and whether chatting or riding silently along commuter-free roads our heads would turn, instinctively, to inventory the progress of the freeze on all manner of moderate-sized water. My father, his body war- and hockey battered, needs knee replacement surgery, which necessarily will end his playing days with the GerriHatTricks. (He’s therefore resisted it.) He hasn’t played, actually, in a couple of years, and instead volunteers to run the time clock at seniors tournaments his teammates enter. This allows him to be in the room “with the boys.”

A relatively new resident “over the Bridge,” Dad hasn’t known this sort of wintery weather there, which made this visit so special. We stopped at Blockbuster early last evening and briefly considered renting ‘Mystery, Alaska,’ but we’d seen it already upwards of a hundred times between us. We took the chocolate lab with us on all of our errands, and included in my Jeep unloading to accommodate her was my Easton street hockey stick. I ride around town with a street hockey stick, it would seem, because you just never know when you’ll spot a game and need to pull over and join. I took the Easton aluminum with its plastic blade out of my Jeep and leaned it against Dad’s garage yesterday. Riding home across the Bridge this morning I realized that I’d left it behind, then immediately smiled realizing that this was that rarest of Washington winter weeks, when street hockey sticks won’t be needed by the weekend.

I want from life this week not four or six standings points for my team but one more walk alongside my father toward our favorite form of recreation, this time a walk we’ve never made: down his property’s slope, skates slung over our shoulders, layered in turtlenecks and bulky sweaters and bluejeans, with a one-year-old lab hell-bent on completing our line. With his arthritic hands and aching back it’s literally the case we’d spend more time gearing Dad up than we would out on the ice tossing passes to one another. Neither of us, I don’t imagine, would complain much about that.