hockey sur glace

The day had turned steely again. Just a band of late-afternoon pink glowing along the hills gave the sole evidence that the sun had even broken through earlier. The trio of us headed far down the ice. We kept near the shore at first, past drooping, yellow-fingered weeping willows, then cut right out for the center of the lake and pushed on toward the opposite side. Long seasoning cracks echoed like kettledrums, and exactly in the middle, where the surface had frozen last and, so, before the snow had come, the girls were amazed at how black it was in its clarity. And the way you could indeed look straight through it, like a lens, to actually see what was a fine display of unbelievably long green weeds far below.

- Peter LaSalle, “Wellesley College for Women, 1969″ from Hockey Sur Glace