Happy to be off the ice with our boots attached firmly to the ground, we walked up the stairs to Confederation Park. We wanted to see the big ice sculptures now that they were finished.
There was a galloping horse. There was a modernistic swirl that looped out at us with a reclining nude sitting foremost. There was a great head with frozen construction workers crawling in and out of it. There was another version of the owl that had tipped over and broken during the two-hour competition. And there was a teddy bear with a short sword fending off a nightmare as a boy slept with his head on his pillow.
But perhaps most significantly, there were the Beaver Tails: a hot, flat tail of dough with liquid maple surgary syrup running off the edges for me, a hot tail with chocolate and hazelnut smeared on top for the fair and industrious Trudy.
Did I say chocolate and hazelnut?
Yes, Trudy’s snack had chocolate and hazelnut dripping off the sides. But lo, there was more. As I finished devouring my maple delight, I looked up at Trudy, and she smiled. She smiled at me as she was chowing down on her chocolate delight, her lips and cheeks decorated in chocolate, her smile radiating sheer undiluted joy.
If only there had been space left on the camera.