Walking on thin ice

I remember spring as a kid vividly. I loved spring. So today I bring to you a few of my favorite spring memories.

Puddles. You know what I mean, the thin layer of ice that covered the puddles in the morning, and the way we would try to walk gingerly across the puddles in hopes of not breaking through the ice. Of course, it didn’t matter how gingerly we walked we still broke through the delicate ice, and more times than not, ended up with a ‘booter’, leading to the drying of socks over the registers during class. Thank goodness my K-2 school insisted we bring slippers to school.

Easter Dresses. My mom was good at a lot of things when I was growing up. But the thing she was the very best at was sewing. We had the best clothes growing up. She sewed us new dresses for Christmas and Easter every year. But the Easter dresses were my favorite. Why? You ask. The colors, of course. My favorite one was a light mauve color, with a little white belt around the waist. If I remember correctly, it also had little ruffles running down from the neckline to the waist. Ahh, new dresses, they never grow old. Of course, the Easter dress leads me to all kinds of other great Easter memories, like family, Easter egg hunts, baskets with that plastic colored nest stuff, paska with sprinkles that I got to add all by myself, and of course the flapper eggs that nobody but the adults ate.

Figure skating. I took skating lessons and taught until I was 18 years old. One of the things that I can look back on fondly is the melting ice. It always meant that the three nights a week at the ‘cable stable’ were coming to an end. There was no artificial ice, and our rink was held together by large cables. As the temperature rose, the ice melted away. The final days we were all better skaters for fear of falling and being soaked.

What are your favorite spring memories?