The Butterfly Hours Memoir Project: ICE SKATING

For 2019 I'm running a year-long series on my blog in which I share my responses to the writing assignment prompts found in THE BUTTERLY HOURS by Patty Dann.

I welcome you to join me, if you like! I've divided the prompts by month, and the plan is to respond to 3 (or so) a week. For some of these I may write poems, for others prose. The important thing is to mine my memory. Who knows where this exploration will lead?

For links to the prompts I've written on so far this year, please click on The Butterfly Hours tab above. This month's prompts include: hospital, hotel, humming, ice-skating, illness, kitchen table, knife, laundry, library, lunch.

ICE SKATING

I, TONYA - if you
haven't seen
this movie, you
should remedy that!

I can only recall ever ice skating once – at Pelham (indoor) Ice Rink when I was in high school. I loved the romance of ice skating, the beauty of the sport, and how we'd follow the Olympic figure skaters (Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, anyone?). It was fun to wear a sweater in summer and lace into white skate with shiny blades. I thought it would be like roller skating, and I guess it was, a little. I wasn't on the ice long enough to get comfortable – my ankles kept collapsing in my skates, and I retreated to the sidelines... maybe memories of broken bones make me give it up, I'm not sure. I've later learned from skater-writer friend Anita Saxena that the ankle-thing is a common experience among non-skaters in rented skates, and that I might have better luck in some quality skates. Maybe someday I'll give it a whirl. But right now I am content to watch others. (This totally deserves a poem... marking this in my notebook to do later!)