Читать книгу Let It Snow. Keeping Canada's Winter Sports Alive онлайн

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“I was sitting at the edge of the village pond, watching the skating. My brothers and sisters and my playmates were having a furious time. It didn’t occur to me to ask for or even expect skates. In families such as ours not everybody could have a pair. You had to wait for an older brother to outgrow his and pass them on to you.

“I noticed a lady standing off to the side. She asked me why I wasn’t skating with the others. I told her, without any sense of envy, that I had no skates. It was one of the natural things about life.

“She took my hand and asked me to come with her. We went into a village store and to my astonishment she bought me a pair of skates.

“‘To keep?’ I asked her.

‘Of course,’ she said.

“I went back to the pond in a daze of glory. I never forgot it. And as for the lady, I never saw her again.”

Winter is Canada’s splendid season and it inspires acts of generosity, from cleaning a neighbour’s sidewalk to commiserating with colleagues on a hard day’s journey into work. In Bowmanville, very near Atkinson’s childhood home in Newcastle, it’s the act of Al and Anna Strike building an ice rink on their front lawn for local children to use even though their own grew up and left home years ago. It’s a tradition approaching its fiftieth year and this book is at least partly a celebration of dedication such as theirs.