The air, as we strode purposefully through the park this weekend, was freezing.
Hubs had to keep pulling out his kleenex to wipe his nose. I let my rhino droplets evaporate, or freeze.
It was a “gloriously, crisp, winter’s day” as we stalwart Englishmen say.
“Aren’t we lucky?” observed a fellow walker and complete stranger, “this time last year it was snowing and we couldn’t get out.”
We were indeed lucky; the sky was blue and the sun was effortlessly hovering over the horizon as I’d seen it do in the mornings. This trick, of rising and then staying suspended for a few hours before hastening across the heavens to rapidly drop then balance precariously just above the western horizon before disappearing in a mass of reds and orange, is canny.
There are designated dog walks within the park and complex gates with admonitions in red circles against our best friends.
Children incite no such warnings, they are allowed on either side of the lake as are their parents and lone strollers!
We chose the children’s side which took us immediately along the water’s edge. The view across the lake popped with the sun, caught in its setting tease, between the nests of the heron on their island sanctuary and the silver birches beyond.
Distracted for a moment we did not notice the sheer abundance of gulls sitting on the lake while the fiery sun caused its surface to glisten. When our eyes finally dropped to water level we stood and stared. There were hundreds of white birds sitting quietly as if turned to stone. On closer inspection we noticed what we thought was an optical illusion resulting from the sun’s playful position in the sky. The gulls looked as though they were standing on the water.
We could see their little orange feet protruding from their fluffed up torsos.
The lake was frozen.
They were standing on the ice.
“Pulling a Jesus,” said Paris, our school teacher daughter, when I told her.
“I didn’t know it was so cold,” I said, although my nose did!
We watched as two ducks waddled across the ice, their feet slipping and sliding as they walked to parts that had broken through where they slid gratefully into the freezing lake.
Their body language said it all,
“Whew, nice to get my feet back in the water again…”