About two years ago we bought this cabin, but didn't really move here until about May. So now, we've been here going on two years, and have come to know the place a little better.

My first observation is, this town really loves skating. I have no idea how much of the high school is actually down on the rink in any given weekend night, but sometimes it seems like all of them. And, they are good skaters. Kids that grow up around here really know how to skate. They aren't all Olympic skaters, but they're all good.

Second is, a friend of mine the other day was ruing how people don't communicate much anymore, as people go around with phones and don't interact on the street, etc. I told her that in Cloudcroft, they do. It's not that they don't have phones or use them, they do. But when they go into town, and hang around, they look at each other, and talk to each other. Individual communication is very much alive.

My girls, 9 and 12, are absolutely fanatical about skating, while the boys don't touch it. The girls want to go down there every night, and do, as long as it's open. So far it's been open about 16 days; we've caught about 14. I've been lucky enough to fall only a few times. Once it was hard to get up, and that made me even more cautious about inching around the perimeter. I try not to hold the rail too much. I try to just skate. Unfortunately, I am still recovering from a fall a year ago, which affected my shoulder, and I'm just not as fast as I used to be. The girls go whizzing around me. They've learned to twirl, to go backwards, to do a backward crossover, all this stuff. Once the younger one said to me, "Daddy, I can skate backward!" I felt like answering, "I can skate forward!" but instead, I just said, "That's excellent!" They are fitting into the town fabric.

After all, we don't have that much to do; this is one thing kids can do. And they can do it better than the rest of us. Love of hockey may have come and gone in the southwest, but, love of skating is still strong here, and I like that.