Max sipped hot coffee from a road-weary travel mug and replaced it in the center console of his 4-wheel drive vehicle. I picked up the same mug and took a thoughtful swallow.

“I don’t see why this is such a big deal, Kate. You pay the guy too much money already, and if you are not satisfied with his performance, you should dump him,” Max concluded emotionlessly. “If someone doesn’t like the care we give at the veterinary hospital, they look for another vet. Of course, we try to make sure that does not happen. Why should your coach be allowed to give you stupid lessons and try to teach you things you don’t want? Why do you let him get away with that?”

Unfortunately, I did not have a good answer. In fact, I wondered the same things myself. Why was I so intimidated by Orville? Did I think he would blacklist me at Hansie’s making me untouchable to coaches I did not want anyway? Maxwell thought all of this was absolutely ridiculous. To him, business was business. If money was exchanged for a professional service, the client had the right to discontinue that service at anytime if it was found to be unacceptable. I had lost faith in Orville. He had given me reason to question his judgment. But skating can be a dirty business. Many coaches earn over a dollar per minute in metropolitan areas. With high hourly rates at stake, coaches compete for students, some unscrupulously. While professional skating instructors are expected to maintain certain standards of decorum, cutthroat behaviors are known to exist. While Orville seemed to be a nice guy, he was still cashing my checks and not teaching me any moves in the field. He winged his lesson plans and apparently felt no obligation to prepare for our appointments. I remembered my last telephone conversation with Willa Blanchard. She had been a nice gal too, but as soon as I left Martinsville, she showed no interest in maintaining our supposed friendship. Why did I misdirect my loyalty toward Orville?

Max reached for the mug again and turned it upside down chugging the last drops. “Why do you bother skating at that crappy little rink anyway? You have a morning off every week. Maybe you could find something better.”

My previous jaunts to other skating facilities ended in frustration, but that was when I worked for Contessa Cosmetics and had no options but to skate at night or on the weekends. Maybe some of those places would have acceptable adult ice in the morning. I would look into alternatives after the holidays.

Most women are delighted with traditional gifts for birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas: a bottle of fine fragrance, long stem roses, candy truffles, any bauble glittering with precious gems. But Maxwell did not give me any of those things for our first anniversary or the Christmas that followed in Maple Terrace, Vermont. We went shopping in Burlington, the closest major city to Maple Terrace where we picked up last minute token gifts for each other as stocking stuffers and novelties. I bought a tapestry throw for Max woven with likenesses dogs and cats. This beautiful thing would look lovely at the cabin or at home in our small condominium.

My husband surprised me with the raw materials to construct a backyard ice rink behind the Maple Terrace cottage: a pile of four-by-four inch lumber and rolls of heavy plastic sheeting. To me, that wood and polymeric film represented the ultimate gift of love. Max supported my skating and wanted me to have my own rink if only for a few weekends far from our everyday residence. He set about clearing rocks from part of the flat yard behind the lake house and uprooted a long dead tree stump. Between the two of us, we enthusiastically laid out the perimeter of the skating area with pieces lumber and unrolled lengths of plastic to line the makeshift arena. It was a beautiful sight, this little rink. From a distance, the translucency of the plastic looked as though ice had already formed within the wooden boundary. Now all we needed was some snow and a couple of cold nights for flooding.

Maxwell’s father had constructed a similar rink in the backyard of Max and Mitch’s childhood, in a clearing at the far corner of the family’s suburban property. The two boys played neighborhood hockey on that rink wearing department store figure skates, blue jeans, and long johns. Max remembered the basics of rink construction from those days. We needed snow to secure the seams of the plastic. A freshly fallen layer would pack into an ideal base for sprinkling with water from a garden hose. Allowing the first dousing to freeze would create a foundation for subsequent floodings. Within a few days, I could skate on my own ice rink until we had to drive back to Connecticut. I could skate everyday at any time and would never have to look over my shoulder for anyone except maybe my husband who might don a pair of hockey skates and stumble around a bit. I would not have to tolerate Orry’s remarks or critical eye, nor would I have to listen to Alex’s well-meaning advice or watch out for one of Zach’s Neanderthal axels.

This concept proved so exciting that I could barely sleep the night after we prepared the wood and plastic skeleton of the rink. Like a child on Christmas morning, I awoke early, turned on an outdoor light and peered out the window at my rink. No snow had fallen. The structure was still as barren as the previous afternoon when I stood in the middle of it staring hopefully into the gray foreboding clouds above. Surely they would dump snow all over the plastic liner sealing it for the rest of winter. I glanced at the electronic device that provided a read-out from the weather station on top of the house. It was only twenty degrees outside, certainly cold enough for snow or the freezing of water in general.

Overly anxious, I suggested we attempt to fill the rink with the hose, and Max agreed. We dragged the hose out of the garden shed and attached it to a spigot on the side of the house. My husband stood dutifully in the cold, holding the nozzle with gloved hands, spraying water over the plastic. With no snow to secure the seams, the water flowed out before it could freeze and soaked the ground under and around the rink. Maxwell decided we had to wait for the weather to cooperate. Puddles formed in low-lying areas and froze into miniature spin spaces. I excitedly tapped them with my toe and watched air bubbles circulate in the liquid water beneath the solidified top layer. Overzealous with anticipation, I stepped too heavily on one of the tempting but delicate puddles, plunging my foot through to the frigid water below.

Like a sentry, I waited for snow and probably would have made sacrificial offerings to the cloudy skies if they might have delivered the precious material required to seal my backyard rink liner. Max delighted in my child-like eagerness. It reminded him of similar emotions he and his brother shared as youngsters thirty years before. Those were happy times for Max and his family. As an adult, I experienced the promise of a backyard rink for the first time, an impossibility where I had grown up in Northern California.

That year the weather station displayed a temperature of fifty-nine degrees on Christmas Day in Maple Terrace, Vermont. The awaited precipitation fell as rain rather than snow, transforming the beautiful foundation of our rink into a quagmire. After the first of the year, we extracted the plastic from the mud puddle, folded it hastily and piled it in the shed. We left the cottage and wooden rink periphery behind, the clay soil saturated from failed flooding and nature’s odd sense of humor.

Max said this weather was unusual. It was always cold in Maple Terrace at this time of year. He remembered the coldness of his boyhood winters at home and at the cottage. Those frigid skating winters highlighted his childhood memory and probably overshadowed recollections of any other seasons when the weather did not allow outdoor ice skating. Compared to the total lifespan of most people, childhood occupies a precious few years, and several powerfully good memories can blot out the mediocre majority. This was probably the case with Max. When asked about his youth, that backyard rink rises quickly to the surface. However, when critically probing into his past, he recalls only two winters when the Svenssen boys had a little rink behind their house.

That spring, we gathered the four-by-fours and piled them alongside the shed. Not too many years passed before moss and lichens grew upon the surfaces of that lumber. We did not bother to attempt another backyard rink fiasco, primarily because we stayed at the cottage for just a week or two over the Christmas holidays. I can only identify a few truly cold Decembers in Maple Terrace, making a layman’s case for global warming. Anyone whose skating depends year-to-year on cold winter months would quickly cite warm rainy winters as proof of the destruction of the ozone layer and formation of greenhouse gases. Such a frustrated ice skating enthusiast would ignore scientific trends over decades and centuries as statistical evidence for climatic change and point ruefully at a chilled mud puddle that should be frozen. Eventually the old metal garden shed collapsed under the weight of snow and ice during one of those extremely bitter winters that might have highlighted the memories of a boy whose father had a penchant for rink construction. The shed has since been hauled to the dump and the site of the defunct rink covered by a boat garage, but the lumber still stands piled in the same place we left it that spring, a monument to two people’s love of skating and a home for chipmunks.

Chapter 73 posted 5/28/03
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