“Skating on the Mill Pond” by Grandma Moses (She knew!)
I wouldn’t trade my middle-class, 1950s childhood for all the tea in China. I certainly wouldn’t trade it for what passes for childhood now.
But the woods have been hewn down and paved over, the swamp and stream filled in so they could build more condos, the palatial estate so thoroughly erased that only a very few of us remember it ever existed–oh, fap! to all that. We do remember!
You can’t tell us “There is no sun.”
It’s cold today, and it’s been cold for a week. If I were ten years old, I know where I’d be headed, right about now.
With my ice skates in my hand–yes, come on, grab your skates and come with me–I would go to the little swamp behind Mrs. S’s back yard. An enormous weeping willow tree hung over it, and beyond it was a palatial estate like a movie star’s. They had an in-ground swimming pool: in those days, a sign of fabulous wealth.
The swamp is frozen over. We walk out onto the ice and follow a stream leading deeper into the woods. It opens into a little round pond, and some of the other kids in the neighborhood are already ice-skating there. Off with the shoes, lace up our skates, and join in the fun: it’s just big enough for half a dozen kids to play crack-the-whip.
You could, if you liked, follow the stream all the way into the middle of the woods, until it grew too narrow for any proper skating. But the pond is more fun. It’s only a stone’s throw into the woods, but it seems much farther because it’s so quiet–except, of course, for the noises made by all of us playing and whooping it up because it snowed last night, heavily, and there is no school today.
We are unsupervised. We are free. We are having a blast! And if the need arises, we’re only three minutes’ walk from the nearest house with adults in it. We’ll skate until we’re too cold to skate anymore, and then it’s back indoors to warm up and maybe play a little Monopoly. It’s about a hundred times better than the best day you would ever have in school.
And the day, at least for now, is ours.
I wouldn’t trade that little frozen pond for all the fancy indoor skating rinks on the planet.
Well, we’ve got 28 inches of snow here in Central New Jersey this morning, and I don’t reckon to be going anywhere.
Whenever it snows any serious amount, I remember what a pure, intense delight it was to wake up in the morning and discover there would be no school that day. I’ll never forget that feeling.
Ah, sledding! Whooshing down the hill at Tommy’s Pond on the ol’ Flexible Flyer. We could keep that up for hours.
The pond was a lot of fun at night, too. Everybody came out for the ice-skating. There was a fire to warm your hands, a bench or two for when your ankles gave out, and whole families gliding around on the ice.
Snowmen standing guard in every yard, snowball fights and snow forts–and oatmeal never tasted so good as it did when you had it for breakfast on a snow day. My wife adds: “Pancakes for breakfast, and we could all have breakfast together because it was a snow day and my father had to stay home from work. That was when he could spend all day playing with us.”
Yeah–and my aunts took me to every lake and pond for miles around for the ice-skating. We got to be true connoisseurs of frozen bodies of water.
I guess I ought to point out that a lot of cities, towns, and counties have banned sledding in recent years, because every human activity in which one just might get injured ought to be banned for our own good, and it’s been many a year since I’ve seen anyone ice-skating on Tommy’s Pond–or anywhere else outdoors, for that matter.
Oh, well, maybe I dreamed it. But if I did, it was a good dream.