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Public Service Announcement: Ski Trails Aren’t Walking Trails

To be clear, everything that follows is NOT about either an inflated feeling of entitlement or a misperception of my rights. Public parks are public places for everyone to enjoy.

But.

But imagine a huge suburban field covered in snow.

After a long winter, that field will almost always be crisscrossed with trails of various sorts. People of all ages trudge through the snow and make walking paths. Animals run into the crisp snowfall and tramp down courses. A maintenance vehicle might drive through to clear a path or empty trash. And skiers lay tracks that are groomed by repeated use into great recreational loops.

Yet, even after a months-long winter these paths need rarely cross.

Walking paths can pack and trace to useful places like benches, sledding hills, ice rinks.

Ski trails can loop and whorl away from the walking trails.

Even with almost no planning or coordination, the two uses of this space need never interfere with each other and still but a mere fraction of the field of snow be disturbed.

So, it was a little upsetting that after a week of work to cut, groom, regroom, use, groom yet again, and eventually make into a useful ski trail…. that someone decided to use that trail as a walking path and crush the effort that myself and other local cross-country skiers had put into building our trails.

Again, we’re not entitled to respect of those trails, but it has long been an unspoken courtesy that unless it is unavoidable or has cut through a high traffic area, you DON’T walk on ski trails.

Walk on the walking paths.

Ski on the skiing paths.

And we all get along.

There’s no sign. There’s no law. There’s no one to yell and say ‘no’ when someone does this. There’s no tit-for-tat revenge plot. There’s nothing at all whatsoever stopping someone from doing this.

It’s just kinda rude and frustrating. Unneighbourly.

Thanks for understanding.

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Clock Works

As my 101 year old grandmother transitions between living situations, she found herself giving away some of her most carefully curated possessions.

At some point in the last forty-six years I (apparently, though unintentionally) impressed upon her that my (genuine) interest in her cuckoo clock, the same clock that hung on the wall of her house for most of my childhood, the same clock that my (late) grandfather would wind daily by pulling the chains down to the floor each night, the same clock that would fascinate us with it’s animations when we visited, that such a clock should end up on my wall some day.

That day was today.

I am feeling a little emotional and humbled, to be honest.

As my parents and relatives assisted with the job of packing up her room and sorting out what needs to move to the next place, my grandmother firmly asserted that the clock was to go to me.

So, suddenly there I was, with something of a family heirloom in a heap on my kitchen table after a short delivery visit by my folks.

As it turns out, my grandmother got tired of the tick-tocking and hourly cuckoos about fifteen years ago, so the beautiful beast has done little more than hung lifeless on her wall as a decoration for that whole time.

I hung it up, set it up, reset it all, and … the ticking doesn’t tock as well as it used to.

The pendulum ticks and tocks for a few seconds… or a few minutes… as long as eight minutes once, keeping accurate time for a fraction of an hour, but then tick-tock-tick… tick…. tick… silence.

I opened it up to see if there was something obviously wrong, but clock works are not my specialty (nor, if I’m being completely honest, a thing that I have anything other than a passing experience) in diagnosing or fixing.

So, for the moment, the family clock is hanging decoration-like on my wall looking sharp and elegant and like it belongs there. But thus starts an adventure to restore it to the glory of the 70s and 80s and those days I remember from my youth, and to bring back the ticks, tocks and maybe even a cuckoo or two.

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Travel Memories in 1000 Pieces

Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas.

Gifting jigsaw puzzles can be tricky.  They vary in difficulty. Not everyone is into spending hours fiddling with a game like that. And then the vast variety of images depicted in their giant tabletop chaos can evoke a feeling that is often a matter of taste, particularly for larger sets that sit there taunting you to build them for weeks and weeks.

Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and hit the nail directly, squarely on the head.

See, back in November we spent five days in New York City. Specifically, we spent five days wandering around mostly near midtown Manhattan and Times Square.  We did a lot of fun stuff, but my own personal recollections of the time there were punctuated by three specific memories: Broadway, sketching, and people everywhere.

Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and it depicts a bustling scene of Time Square rendered as a colourful urban sketch of a hundred memories of our recent New York vacation.

Tall colourful buildings.

Taxicabs and street vendors.

People and signs and shapes and shadows.

Lines and hatches and curves and squiggles.

A thousand pieces of a travel memory perfectly encapsulated in a jigsaw puzzle project.

…though it didn’t take us too long at all to get it assembled.

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hoar frosty

hOr / frawst – (noun)

From the old English, hoar frost evokes the hairy, beard-like frost that grows upon trees and other outdoor objects when the combination of temperature and humidity crystalize ice in a white, icy fuzz on all the surfaces of the world.

It is a kind of magical scene, assuming it is not too cold to be outside.

The dog and I felt compelled to walk for over an hour through this wintery wonderland.

If you thought it was magic walking through a gentle snowfall in the evening, with the flakes drifting through the air all around you and in every direction like stars descending slowly through the spaces and places, try instead walking through a winter forest the morning after a fog when the hoar frost covers literally every branch with a frozen crystalline twinkle.

To reach out an touch the delicate ice is to destroy it, either shattering or melting it into nothingness, back to dusty snow or a drop of cold dew on your fingertip.

And as the sun reaches into the sky, the apricity sublimates it back into the atmosphere, like fairy dust returning to the magical source, suddenly and subtly gone without explanation. The fungal-like growth slinks back into whence it came.

To walk between and under trees covered in hoar frost is to feel the deep cold of mid-winter with your eyes and to understand the power of nature to decorate itself in such a visualization of the weather.

Powerful and gentle, peaceful and extreme.

Crisp.

White.

Cold.

Frosty.