Icy Joy

Well, there's one good thing about this terribly-cold cold snap.

The pond is frozen, and the boys are in their glory.  (I guess that's two good things.)

Last night was the first night they were on it.  The four of them checked it before they came in for supper and decided it was ready.  After eating, they eagerly gathered all the paraphernalia - skates and sharpeners and skate guards and face masks, Caleb's homemade wooden goal, hockey sticks, hockey pucks and 101 other things - and headed out to the pond.

I finished up the dishes and then went outside on the porch to listen to some of my favorite sounds in the world.  Blades slicing across the pond ice.  The wrap of the puck hitting their sticks.  Their voices calling and laughing.  I can't begin to explain how beautiful those things sound on an intensely cold winter's night when it's so still that every sound is of razor-sharp clarity.  The crisp, cutting coldness provides a background that seems to intensify it all.  And I find it even more difficult to put into words the joy that I find in those sounds.  Icy joy.