Frozen.

With many memories it's hard to know what I remember from pictures and videos, and what I REALLY remember, without prompting.  There are tons of memories, but also TONS of photos.

Then there are some memories so vivid, and without a single photo.

I wonder if Annie remembers.  I wonder how old she was... six?  I wonder how old I was.  I was young enough to believe that anything we did was because my parents, as adults, had an inside track on everything that was neat to do, and if they were doing it with us, it was because they'd done it a thousand times before and were pros at it.  I wonder if they'd ever done this before.

The river was frozen over.  We all piled into the yellow and wood paneled minivan.  Dad drove down to ferry landing, and out on to the ice, following the cleared paths.  He pulled off, and started shoveling until there was enough space for us to skate.

I'm assuming we had skates.  By then we should have had the box of old skates, worn many years earlier by my dad's law partner's now adult children.  But, we could have just been slip sliding in our snow boots.

I don't know what we were wearing, our how long we were out there.  Mom must have been a nervous wreck.

Years later, Dad would freeze over our side yard, and we'd get out the skates again.  There we bumps, but not too many, in the ice from where air had risen up from the yard below.  They looked like white knuckles trapped under the ice.

We would skate out there one day with my grandpa Fred.  Grandma was there too, with Aunt Nancy and Uncle Paul -- my grandpa's brother -- but they didn't skate.  I don't know if we skated out there just that day or 100 times, I just remember seeing my grandpa on skates and shuffling around our tiny rink with him.