"Safety in Popsicles"

I love winter for ninety-eleven reasons:

1) When I wear snowshoes, my size 10 hooves actually feel petite in comparison. This is also why I sometimes sport a pair of huge "We're #1" foam hands when I teach sign language.

2) Scarves are the accessory that can never go wrong. I read this in Isadora Duncan's biography.

3) Cold temperatures create a perfect excuse to stomp inside and sip on a hot cup of cocoa...or, better yet, to bypass the cocoa and simply pour Kahlua into a mug.

Frankly, I bypass the mug and pour the booze directly into my gaping maw.

Oh, all right. I bypass the Kahlua and chug Isopropyl, Kitty Dukakis style. She, too, loved a good snowball fight--before the rubbing-alcohol-induced blindness set in. At least we now have an excuse for "throwing like girls."

4) If I view my reflection in a piece of ice, my crow's feet are hardly discernible. Frozen water mirrors are hella cheaper than laser surgery.

5) When I pour juice into a cup of snow, I am catapulted back in time to age six at the Yellowstone County Fair, to a day when I had a really kickarse snowcone. Fortunately, with my homemade snowcone, eaten far away from the 4-H cow barns, I don't even have to cry when I trip and drop it. I just dive to all fours and start lapping.

Pride and snowcones are poor bedfellows.

6) When I go cross-country skiing, my vocal chords get a much-needed limbering up; you better believe I'm a screamer on them hills. Post-ski, my throat thoroughly warmed, I'm ready to come home, spin a disc, and hit all Mariah Carey's high notes.

Incidentally, if I ever do willingly remain in the presence of a Mariah Carey song, please grab an ice pick and stab it into my frosty white buttocks. Then do it some more.

7) Ice skates = the poor man's Ginsu knife. Many a loaf of foccacia has regretted my triple lutz.

8) Before the cold really hits, when local ice is still in its infancy, having Niblet sit on a lakeside cliff and tush-sled downwards is a tad worrisome. However, once a solid, fierce coldsnap hits and holds, his airborn descent is no longer given final punctuation by a "splash"


but, rather, after a silent Wile E. Coyote moment of hovering mid-air between cliff and lake, our lad hits the frozen ice mattress of Lake Superior with a dull "thud."

What a relief that he won't drown.


(look at this patsy priss-priss of a lake way back in November; it's all "Oooh, look at my freely-churning waves." But no more, friend. No more. Slowly, gradually, the little flirt is hardening into a surface reminiscent of Nicole Kidman's forehead, capable of no natural movement.)

Way to go, Winter.

"Cooling Our Jets"









In my last post, I pretty much took the piss out of winter--and February especially.

Time for true confessions: I actually adore winter.

It is one of my three favorite seasons, in fact. And when a winter overflows with snow, it makes the cut for Top Two.

But, damn, when there's no snow, that's when I start to look like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining. I sit at my typewriter, in an empty hotel, tapping over and over, "All winter and no snow makes Jocelyn a dull girl."

Maybe if I didn't revel in outdoor sports during the winter, I wouldn't miss the snow so much. Instead, I could recline happily on my chaise lounge, running my pearl necklace along my teeth, sipping chamomile tea with my pinky extended, sniffing, "Jeeves, I do so love dry feet. Why ev-a would those people willfully go out into those drifts of that white stuff?"

But me luuurves the cold and the snow. Two years ago, I went snowshoe running three or four times a week, to the point that I had trouble staying upright, even in the house, without crampons on the bottom of my feet. Last year was The Year of the River Ski, when I would hop onto my old skis and shuffle up and down a frozen creek, tracking snowshoe hares. At the waterfalls, unlike my groom of seven years, I would take off my skis and slide down, rather than kamikazi-ing it down the frozen slope. This year, I was looking forward to more of the same snow-fueled exploration.

But you know the icing on top of a Twinkie? We've had snow just that deep so far this year.

Suck.

And then a little layer of chocolate icing on top of that Suck.

That's all we've had: one small stick of Suck with thin Suck frosting on top, rotting in the fridge.

But.

Then.

We found this year's winter glory, and it's this amazing thing called--get this--ICE.

One little trip over to the lake just outside our door--you know, the really big, superior lake--and my face looked like this:



That first visit to the Big Ice was followed the next day by another few hours of sliding around the world's most fascinating playground, and the next day by another few hours, and the next day by another few hours.

Who needs wussy, only-for-faerie-folk, light-as-dust, softie snow when there's the real, hardcore, tectonic-plate-shifting, bone-crushing ICE two blocks from my house? As of last week, I'm all about throwing my and my children's bodies onto this junk:

There is a loveliness and grandeur to the pack ice that stops my breath.

And when we have visitors, such as my sister-in-law and her partner this past weekend, our best idea of "what to do to show the out-of-towners a good time" entails giving them only-slightly-lead-ridden popsicles:

On this killer-cool ice, a person can ponder. A person can stare at the horizon endlessly. A person can listen to the cracks and shifting of the ice, likening it to whales calling each other. The stuff is alive.
















Niblet is enamored of the music in the ice; he uses the ice picks Groom made for him to whack away at the 'cicles, making different melodies each time a handful cascades down.



We've also played a form of bocce ball with rocks on the ice, taken hockey sticks out and bashed at the formations, made our own curling stones and slid them across vast expanses, and broken off huge slabs to use as twirly-sleds across the lake. I even carried one huge slice of ice home--4 inches thick--pretending all the way that I'd just come down from The Mount and had been handed new commandments ("Thou Shalt Not Wear Leggings"). Once we got that slab home, Groom fired up a blowtorchything and sculpted a lovely hole right through it. Ice, ice, baby? It's the fun that just keeps on giving.

Even more, toting home heavy pounds of frozen water reminded us of a hundred years ago, when we would have been cutting great blocks of the stuff to fill our homemade refrigerators--imagine how well the butter would keep...and how uncurdled our yogurt would remain, well into August!











(This photo has nothing to do with Lake Superior or ice, really. I had just paid 12 Sherpas $100,000 to haul me to the top of Everest. I took off my oxygen mask just long enough to snap this picture. Then they hauled me back to basecamp, where a pedicure awaited.)





Without snow so far this year, we'd not been able to use our homemade "digger" sled...but suddenly we realized we could enact a real-life version of our Polar Explorer board game. First musher to the South Pole gets the Queen's endless gratitude!



Girl, here, takes her new-found ice riding skills off the lake, up to the woods, where she toodles down a frozen flow from a broken cistern. She is Sister Cistern (one small step removed from Sister Christian, right?)

Ah. Now *this* is a chaise lounge.

And *this* is a playhouse...until it melts, and the children are crushed under the enchanting A-frame.

Remember Jack Nicholson's character in the final scene of The Shining--outside the hotel in the hedge maze, frozen into an eternal stasis?

Luckily, my stasis here doesn't involve scary twins or REDRUM kids. All I am is ECI YPPAH.