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Sometimes, when he was a boy, he could hardly wait to get to sleep on Friday night because he knew he was going to get scrambled eggs the next morning.
    One Friday night as she was washing the dishes, Morley said, “I make the best scrambled eggs you’ve ever had.”
    The next morning she squeezed fresh juice and got out their matching coffee mugs. Carefully folding their one pair of linen napkins, laying them out side by side, she whisked up six eggs and brought them to the table. Dave stared at them. There were little green flecks all through his scrambled eggs. Pieces of chives Morley had snipped from the back garden. In Cape Breton you don’t add anything to scrambled eggs. Except maybe ketchup. But this was his bride, and she had made these eggs. Dave picked up his fork. When he had finished, he said, “I love your scrambled eggs.”
    The next weekend the eggs came with chopped-up mushrooms. The weekend after that, it was tomatoes and onions. Then spinach. On the fifth weekend it was cheese.
    Dave had begun to hate Saturday mornings. He would lie in bed listening to the sound of a knife hitting a chopping board. How did I get mixed up with this person? he wondered.
    By the middle of that first winter, they were both thinking, This marriage is a big mistake. Here it was, January of all things, and Morley was gloomy. Under a year married, and she felt like she had been sentenced to life with a stranger.
    One night on television there was a news story about the canals in Holland. The reporter squinted awkwardly at the camera as he interviewed an old man smoking a meerschaum pipe at an outdoor cafe. The old man said it was the first time in ten years that the canals in the Netherlands had frozen. The newscast cut from the old man to pictures of a Dutch boy lacing up his skates on a canal bank and from him to three girls in folk costume skating hand in hand through an unidentified village.
    Morley watched the entire report with her chin cupped in her hand. Then she turned to Dave and said, “I’ve always dreamed of doing that.”
    Dave, who had been only half paying attention, said, “Really? That was your dream?”
    Morley said, “Yes.”
    Dave stood up and walked into the kitchen. When he came back, he was carrying a beer. He looked at his wife and said, “We should go.”
    Morley said, “To Holland? Don’t be silly.”
    Dave said, “Maybe this is our only chance. Maybe the next time it happens, we’ll have kids and a mortgage and we won’t be able to go.”
    Dave had never said anything about kids before.
    He smiled at her. And he went back into the kitchen and picked up the telephone. When he hung up, Morley was standing beside him. Watching. Nothing like this had ever happened to her.
    “We leave tomorrow. We’ll be back on Monday,” said Dave. He was looking right at her.
    The next morning they bought Dave a pair of hockey skates. At lunch Morley held out a present she had wrapped in newspaper. She said, “It’s almost finished. I was going to give it to you for your birthday. I can finish it on the plane.” It was a heavy blue wool sweater.
    “This is a beautiful sweater,” said Dave. “I love this sweater.”

    When the plane landed in Amsterdam, Morley had her face pressed to the window. She wanted to see everything. She wanted to make sure the canals were still frozen.
    They went skating right away.
    But the canals in Amsterdam were wide and windy and open, and the ice was soft and bumpy and treacherous. It wasn’t like Morley had imagined it at all. It was like skating on a freeway.
    The man at the hotel said, “You have to go to Friesland.”
    So on Saturday they rented a car and drove into the country. They parked at the end of a road and left their boots and coats under a long row of willows that stood bare and wispy along the banks of the canal. When Morley climbed down onto the ice, it was like her dream—the canal was framed by the high protective banks. She felt like she was a little