The day I ice skated on my front yard

Oklahoma has freakish weather.  It is known for being in Tornado Alley, but you don’t have to live through a tornado to experience some weather-related excitement there.  I have seen a hole the size of a Volkswagen blown in a roof by lightning.  I have seen a summer storm fill the gutters in a minute, all the way to the top with warm, chocolatey water.  I have seen the extremes of the continental climate from a first-hand vantage, so I know how extreme it can get.  Weather like that adds interest to the life of a boy not yet old enough to lose his sense of wonder.

One three-day span stands out in my memory as perhaps the strangest.  It was early winter, a time of great variability anyway, but this particular period impressed me.  The first day brought about 6 inches of snow, falling steadily out of the steely skies all day and into the night.  The next day dawned cold, but the sun came out at mid-day, and the temperature climbed into the seventies.  The skies darkened in the late afternoon as huge, anvil-topped thunderheads built in the west.  Instead of rain, though, we got pea-sized hail which pelted into the top layer of snow cover.  Soon thereafter, as the sun descended, the clouds swept by, and the sky cleared as the temperature started to drop.  It went into the teens that night, and the next day dawned bright and clear.  Looking out the window, the hail embedded in the snow sparkled and glistened, fracturing the light into millions of tiny spectra, some complete, some partial.  Roy G. Biv would have been proud of most of them.

Walking outside, it became clear that this crust of ice and snow was very strong.  My sister and I didn’t break through it, even when we jumped up and down.  I think it must have been my mother who suggested we try to ice skate on the icy crust.  Whoever it was, the idea was genius.  We spent most of the morning gliding back and forth on our front yard until the sun softened the snow, and the ice skating was over.

I have told this story a few times in my life, but I stopped telling it because I became aware over time that almost no one ever believed it.  When my parents moved us from Oklahoma, they moved us away from the only audience that would understand and appreciate a story like that.

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