The snow is back.  After our dry January, winter has reasserted itself with daily dispatches of snow and wind.  There are neat little aisles where the neighbors have gone through with snowblowers and then there's our driveway and sidewalk which are more of a patchwork shovel affair.  As I stack the snow up with my big yellow metal-edged shovel, Birtie comes along with her little green plastic shovel and scrapes mounds back into the walkway.  Then she flops in a pile and snow tumbles down around her.  We do this little back and forth of piling and unpiling for awhile, until I judge that things are cleared enough that my neighbors will not risk life and limb crossing my sidewalk to retrieve their mail.  But no matter what sort of path Birtie and I agree to leave, the wind comes along shortly and drifts it all again --- my shoveled (and toddler-deshoveled) walk as much as my neighbors' snowblown one.  Thank goodness, wind disheveles equally.

Our neighborhood sits smack up against land that rises and rises until it becomes Mount Jumbo.  At our end of things, this quickly changing topography makes for some fantastic sledding.  The pack of neighborhood boys have a whole lexicon to the sledding runs they've made: the Luge, Snow Face, Epic Death.  I send my boys out in snowpants and mittens and scarves and hats and try to protect them from the elements so they can hurtle themselves down crazy careening pitches with their pals, two to a sled.  That's the fun in being in a kid, right? - oblivious to the cold and the danger until all of a sudden it's dark and time for hot cocoa and you realize you can't feel your fingers anyway.

In addition to sledding, we've been popping down to our neighborhood rink to skate.  Several years ago, I took six weeks of basic figure skating (which was a hoot and Tim has the recital video to prove it).  And last year I ditched my figure skates for hockey skates.  Like many things in life (learning another language, playing an instrument, etc...) skating is something I wish I had mastered in my youth.  I have a lot farther to fall now than I did when I was eight and there's a lot more of me to hit that ice.  But, despite these caveats, skating is a family favorite these days and if I have an odd, open hour to myself, I often go practice my turns - forward crossover, backward crossover, forward crossover, backward crossover.  Around and around I go and when it's time to leave, I say to myself, "just one more round."  And when that round is done, I go again. 

There's something absolutely delightful about practicing.  In adult life, I so rarely feel myself improve at anything.  It's more the case that I've hit basic proficiency with many things and keep to these familiar routines.  But skating is different.  I can work a turn until I've done it faster and tighter.  I can make progress on trusting my outside edges more.  That's the kind of obvious learning that isn't the regular stuff of adulthood and its the thrill that will keep me out there, like my boys sledding down Snow Face, until long after the sun is down and I finally realize I can't feel my fingers.  Now if only there was someone at home readying me a steaming cup of cocoa, that would be a reason to unlace my skates.