Sweeping Like My Life Depended On It

In January, my friend talked me into a "learn to curl" night at the local curling club. I'd only ever seen curling on TV during the Winter Olympics and thought it looked like shuffleboard on ice.

It is much harder than it looks. You slide out of a crouch on one foot, push a forty-two-pound granite stone down the ice and let go with a gentle twist. Then your teammates sweep frantically in front of it with brooms to make it travel farther.

I fell on my backside on my first throw. My stone stopped about halfway down the sheet. On my second, it sailed off the back of the ice. The instructor, a cheerful retired dairy farmer, said I had "lots of enthusiasm."

But the sweeping. Oh, the sweeping. You run alongside the stone, scrubbing the ice as hard as you can while the skip yells "HARD! HARD!" It's the most fun I've had in years.

I joined a league. Our team is called the Sweep Dreams. We're terrible. We've won two games all season and celebrated both of them like the Stanley Cup.