these go to 11.

My elementary school would always pay someone to prepare and maintain an ice rink during the winter.  Before recess, we’d all sit on the floor on the hallways leading outside lacing up our skates and chattering and wrapping ourselves in scarves and putting on those mittens on strings.  We’d have races, we’d learn spins, and the bad kids would clothesline the nerds.  Winter recess ice skating was awesome.

One year, we had an unseasonably warm day in the beginning of February and the ice rink melted.  Everything melted.  The next day, it got freakishly cold again and everything froze over, but since everything had been liquid the day before, when it refroze, all of the playground was coated with a thick coat of perfectly smooth ice.

I don’t think I’d lived until I’d experienced the weird pleasure of wearing ice skates on the monkey bars, or skating as fast as I could from one end of the playground to the other and then dropping to my knees and sliding 20 feet on my snowpants.  I think we had a couple of ice playground handstand contests, too, which was probably pretty dangerous.

Best winter ever.