Little Girls on Skis

"Hold on," I said. "Just let me get ready." 

I moved to leave Liezl's room. I turned the doorknob and opened the door. As I was about to pass through the door and into the hallway, Liezl called me.

"Sam?"

I turned around. "Yeah?"

"Sometimes--some days, I feel like I'm in Colorado. Do you know what I mean? Does that make any sense?"

I leaned on the door jamb for support, fighting the urge to rest my head on it. "Yeah. No. Yeah. That makes sense. I know what you mean. I-I get you."

***

My mom called me about a week ago. "Dad wants to ski with you this weekend."

"What day?"

"Oh." She sounded surprised at my quickly implied agreement. "Saturday."

"Okay."

On Friday, I drove to Killington, took my pass picture, and drove home to wait for my parents.

On Saturday morning, my dad and I took the gondola to the top and began the cycle of the most ridiculously repetitive recreational sport I've ever had the opportunity and misfortune to partake in. 

On one of our first runs, we were standing in line, waiting to alternate with a group from the line next to us. To our left, a little girl was leaning on her poles and looking up to say something to a man, presumably her father. She pushed herself forward with little red mittens wrapped clumsily around the grips of her poles. My father took his left pole and pressed it across my shins, as if I was going to cut the father-daughter duo in front of us. I watched her; she stopped herself on the plastic line that said, "STOP STOP STOP," handed her father her poles, and took his hand as she shuffled and slid herself to the line that said, "LOAD HERE LOAD HERE LOAD HERE." He lifted her onto the chair when it swung around. Her skis whacked against each other and her little body bounced as the chair bumped over the first few wheels on the chairlift line.

Wearing skis is half standing and half sliding, but there were so many people on the first day Killington was open from the top to the bottom, there wasn't a lot of room for the "sliding" aspect of skiing. Between runs, I froze on the chairlift without my neckie or an actual jacket; my father teased me that I can't live in Vermont if I was going to be cold, joking I'd have to turn in my license for a Massachusetts one. I told him I wasn't complaining about the cold and therefore couldn't be scolded. I almost told him what I actually thought. I wanted to ask him if bravery was the absence of fear or just the overcoming of it, and if it was the latter, was I even cold if I didn't complain about it? But my father didn't want to hear any of that, so I put the tops of my poles in my armpits, slid my fingers from their individual sections of my gloves to keep them, observed the snow underneath my skis, and didn't say anything.