On Ice

I have been absolutely in love with Papertrey Ink’s On Ice stamp set and die. I know that I’ve been so smitten because I’ve been reminded of such fun winter memories as a child in the small town where I grew up in Illinois.

A few fun facts about this small town :
• one of the town’s two stores when I was young was a rock shop
• the main street is also a county line road; one half of the town is in one county and the other half in a different county
• the population is about 250 and technically is a “village” rather than a town
• many kids went to the same school that their parents did, and my siblings and I also had the same principal that my father had when he was a child
• the fire department were volunteers, and the fire equipment was held in the fire “barn” on main street, across the street from our house

Each winter the firemen (okay, our dads) would take the fire truck to the school and water down the second tennis court behind the school, close to the railroad tracks. That cement slab magically became our skating rink for the winter, and almost every kid in town could be found there on any given winter day. Kids could find skates by borrowing them from older siblings or from friends, and the lucky ones would find their own new, shiny pair under the tree on Christmas morning. I can still remember tightly lacing my own new skates around my ankles one special year! We would take our skates to school so that we could skate during recess, and on the weekend we would “walk the tracks” to the rink. The cold never bothered us, and we knew that when we got home we’d have hot cocoa made from the mix my mom would make in the big Tupperware container – yes, that cocoa mix recipe has been around for a long time!
I had a chance to visit there a few weeks ago, just to spend some time reminiscing!

The rock shop is gone now but was in the empty lot next year to this post office.  Sometimes I can still smell what the shop smelled like!

The county line road. 

The fire "barn".  A fire was a big deal, and many people in the town would follow the truck when it was called out! 

The tennis court/skating rink was behind the tall patch of weeds.   

 These are tracks that we would walk, skates over our shoulders, to get to the rink.

Finally, in celebration of these fun memories, I thought I'd share this card using the On Ice set and die along with some October Afternoon designer paper.

Thank you for stopping by and for sharing these special memories with me!  God Bless!