Jay Griffiths, 'Skate Fever' in Lapham's Quarterly:
The year has two generosities: that of harvest, as August augments into autumn, ripening and swelling, the other of white beginnings and open futures where all is possibility, wide as a frozen lake when you can no longer see its limits. A clean sheet of paper speaks of the same generosity, where nothing is prescripted and anything can begin. A wide-open day, too, when time stretches untrapped by schedule and offers opportunity, so spontaneity uncurls and basks in the extravagance of the open moment...
Ice sharpens your thoughts, and out here everything is sharp: skate blades, frost, sunlight in your eyes -- even the contrast between day and night is sharpened by cold. Summer has an incoherent lushness, warm and lolling, rolling over everything else, slurred. Winter has a cold coherence, exact and electric, compact as skates laced tight and sharp to the clean ice.
