The only way the girls could get enough rink time was to play hockey, too. So we did. The boys actually didn’t care about how good you were, in fact, they didn’t care how good they were, the thing was to keep going til you had to go home, and since there were no street lights in the country, some nights, that meant it was dark by 5:30.

I liked no hockey at all, when my parents skated, too, sometimes with their friends and the friends’ kids, on moonlit nights when we could skate back a couple of miles if we had the stamina, on the flooded creek ( called a “crick”) that crossed the garden and kept going deep into the north pasture, the ice smooth, but not pond flat, and mounded in places like icing. Once you figured out where these descending smooth bumps were, you could come at them with increasing speed and crouch as you coasted over them. Students of agriculture from Ghana or New Zealand sometimes interned on the farm in winter to see modern agricultural practices in action( like steer feedlots) by being farm hands for a couple of months. They were hilarious learning to skate, laughing their—to us— strange asses off, and making us laugh at grown men who didn’t know how to skate and kept falling down. We gave a ride home one Christmas to a farm hand’s son who played in the NHL, and I will never forget how much of the back seat he filled.