6AM….Brenda’s honey-do list to me:

XXXXXXXXXXX (very important!)
YYYYYYYYYYY (long overdue!)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZ (absolute must!)

and P.S., mister gluten-free retired person, cook a nice dinner for your working-class, and still-working wife……OR ELSE!….even my pre-caffinated brain could read between those lines….

…..chasened, I put on 16 items of clothing and headed for the swamp….temperature 8 degrees, sky clear…and there it was, at last: 4 solid inches of ice…..grey, slightly orange-peeled, with deep stress cracks lazily going here and there, and beautiful well-healed sunburst drain holes….and sun…now beginning to touch the far wooded hills….on with the nordic skates!….. scramble carefully into verticality…scrape-glide, scrape-glide ….the skater’s wind slowly builds….as those unique muscles relearn their jobs…

it seems there’s always one particular day, in each early-ice season, when….as Carol Cold and Willy Warm teeter-totter in the playground, bully Freddy Frigid puts his heavy foot on Carol’s end….and the game changes…..

back home, I revised my honey-do:

1. tell the world about the ice
2. rest and pray for wind
3. skate and skimbat on the swamp at noon
4. nap
5. skate in the wonderful late afternoon gloaming; skate right into the sunset
6. order a pizza

hmmm…. did I leave something out?