I Waited 32 Years For These

As a child, I spent a good number of years involved in figure skating and can recall in painstaking detail the pinched sore feeling of my numb and frozen feet after their release from their white leather prisons. Being a gal with wide feet, figure skates were never my friend but they were a sad requirement of being involved in the sport. I was envious of the boys in their roomy pick-free hockey skates at "free skate" at the rink. I harboured visions of owning my own spiffy pair of black skates and skating like the wind, even on bumpy pond surfaces that were the bane of my figure skating existence. My last pair of figure skates were used approximately 6 times in 7 or 8 years. I'd given up skating for good, other than the odd recreational foray onto a pond or the canal. We moved out to the countryside and they were stored in a shed where they remained for almost two years in pristine condition--unmolested until a hungry squirrel made a mid-January meal of them, devouring 1/3 of the right skate. That was back in 2001. I never bothered to replace them.

Yesterday my high school BFF and I made plans to take the boys out skating for the first time. I panicked a bit about not having skates and made a last-minute run to the sports shop up the road where I (once again) freed my husband from the task of finding my birthday present. I bought a brandnew pair of beautiful silvery-grey soft boot Dominion "comforTEC" skates. I can't seem to find a picture of them online, or I'd show them off! Maybe I'll have to get some to take a picture of them in action. ;)

The boys were terribly amused (and relieved, I think) to see me falling on my bum over and over again, as I adjusted to the shorter blades, different boot shape, and lack of a pick. My most spectacular wipeout landed me with a purple and red contusion roughly the size of an apple on the underside of my kneecap. I had been skating backwards a little too fast and went to stop by tipping up on the front of my skates to dig my picks into the ice when I was rather violently reminded that hockey skates do not have picks. :D

The knee is pretty tender and swollen today and I'm trying to keep things easy so as not to further injure it, but I absolutely can't wait to get out on my skates once again!