In the marriage of my youth, my children’s father and I even dug a pond next to our farmhouse, where we tried (seldom successfully) to clear the snow off ourselves. I will always hold onto a memory of a night when a lake, just down the road, was suddenly revealed to be perfectly frozen, from one end clear to the other distant shore: Black ice, as far as the eye could see. I can’t remember what we did about our three young children, home in their beds, but we must have rounded up a sitter. Arm in arm, with no light but that of the moon, we took off across that lake.

We were far from the shore when I heard the sound of cracking, and for a moment my heart stopped. But we were in no danger, really. What we heard was the sound ice makes — even very thick, very solid ice — when it expands and contracts, as it always does, especially in the coldest conditions.

(Was it that night, or the next morning, when we returned with the children, and took in the sight of a lone pair of skaters? A husband and wife, of Finnish heritage, I recall, in their 70s, at least, who held aloft a homemade sail to catch the wind. The two of them barely needed to move their feet. They shot across the lake as one, like a sleek vessel at the America’s Cup.)

Hanging up my skates (temporarily)

In my early 40s, I moved with my children to the San Francisco Bay Area — a place untouched by below-freezing temperatures. I loved so much of life in California, but I had to hang up my skates. And for the next 20 years or so, my skating experiences were restricted to occasional visits, on trips to New York City, to Wollman Rink. I tried Radio City too, and Bryant Park. But their rinks were always so crowded. The illusion of flight, impossible.

Five years ago, I was back in New England with my second husband, Jim, on the hardest kind of mission. We had flown the 3,000 miles to Boston in search of a surgeon willing to operate on Jim, in the hopes of successfully removing a tumor in his pancreas.