There’s no reason for me to like ice skating. Ice is hard and cold; my ankles are weak and my feet the wrong shape for skinny figure skates. Even so, skating outdoors is for me one of life’s greatest pleasures, and my only complaint about winter is that it’s not consistently cold enough here to freeze the pond frequently enough for my liking.

In the past few weeks, we’ve had every sort of weather here: cold snap, 50-degree thaw, snowstorm, rainstorm, ice storm, earthquake (really). Just before Christmas, I was walking Minor home from school and saw some people skating out on the pond. I deposited Minor, rounded up Aitch, and headed out to the pond, but by then the surface was empty. There is no “all clear” signal for skating at that pond, and I felt nervous about bringing Aitch out on the ice in the dark without some confirmation that the ice was safe.

I called the police department to ask if there was some gauge they used — x days below y degrees, for example — to determine if the ice were safe. “Hmm, I never thought of that before,” the officer said. “Call the fiyah depahtment.” The fire department said that they do not certify ice safety because of the liability. I asked, “When would you personally consider it safe to skate?” He said, “I guess if other people were skating too.”

My friend C. tells me that in Sweden they have a similar yardstick, with a little saying that goes something like this: “When can you tell that the ice safe for skating? When the Svensons are out on it.”

So yes, we’re all irrational sheep, and I knew the ice was solid, but I still couldn’t bring myself to take Aitch out. We went to the indoor rink instead, and the next day the temperature went up to 60.

This week, after another series of ice storm/rain storm/slush storm, the pond finally froze over again. This time, there were other skaters, but the ice surface was rather…uneven. I’m not talking about the kind of texture that happens on an indoor rink after an hour of free skate, when they send the Zamboni out to make it all smooth again. I’m talking…ripples. Divots. Speed bumps. In the ice.

I am a fair-ice skater at best, and the prospect of having to navigate through an obstacle course in search of clear ice, all while towing a five-year-old, is extremely intimidating. I have always hated making the transition from non-ice to ice, like the first time you step on the skating rink from the floor, and when skating on an ungroomed pond, you make that transition every few minutes.

Luckily, there is a race of people here in the Northeast who live for winter, and as soon as the ice is thick they show up with brooms, shovels, and other implements to resurface sections of the ice by hand. Once they’ve done the hard work, they set up permanent hockey camp on the cleared bits. When they take a break, we sometimes get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Yesterday I heard one of the hockey dads lamenting the conditions on his makeshift rink, noting that the impending snowstorm would not make the ice any easier to clear. “Know what we should do?” he said to another hockey dad. “Let’s come out here tonight, before the snow hits, and flood it. We’ll bring a generator and a submersible, and then tomorrow morning we can come down here first thing and clear the snow.” One thing I’ve realized since moving here is that every household north of the Merrimac River has its own generator, at the ready for emergencies like power failure or uneven ice.

You’ve got to love these hardy New Englanders