While Ottawa is experiencing warm days and sunshine more like summer than fall, this pile of wood showed up beside the baseball diamond in my local park on Monday, a reminder that winter is coming. With the leaves on the trees only just beginning to change, it is a time of transition.

Probably most Canadians could tell you that the pile of wood is a set of boards for a hockey rink. We haven’t had our first frost yet, but city workers are getting ready for winter. It is an annual ritual; in municipal parks across the land.

Sometime soon, long before the snow flies, the boards will go up. Once it is cold enough, the rink will be flooded and the skating season will begin. At the end of March the process will reverse, and the boards will disappear into storage until September.

This has been happening all my life. Canadians just take it for granted that the rink will appear and disappear as the weather changes. No politician ever suggests that the city can save money by no longer funding public skating.

Which leaves me wondering: What else am I taking for granted?