Recap of Smuggler's Notch, VT

I wrote at the beginning of our 5-day trip to Smuggler's Notch; now for posterity’s sake, a recap. Day 3, we tried one long green run as a family. I finally sent them ahead. It’s too daunting to watch their little statures flying down the mountain. That anxiety nearly knocks me over. Put me on my own little green run and meet me at the end of the day. That’s the ski equivalent of fingers in the ears singing “la-la-la” when you don’t want to hear what’s going on around you. Worried about me, Bill called to see if I was OK. “Going at my own pace.” I like to ski alone. If for some reason I can’t make it down a slope, I have confidence that all those instructors of 4-year-olds on my green run will get the ski patrol involved.

We will probably need to hire someone to ski with Will on those double- and triple-blacks he wants to ski in the future. Bill skied hard on blues and blacks with Will. Bill concedes that Will can pretty much out-ski him. The kid thrives on challenge and calculated (hopefully) risk-taking.

Liam exhibited control over apparent chaos. The last day of class was a Saturday. Parents collected at the bottom of the hill waiting for their kids to return from lessons. While waiting, I noticed that too many Saturday parents were waiting 10-deep directly in front of the lesson starting points which were also the finishing points. Thinking that was a little dangerous for the kids, I shrugged that thought off and tried to remember what the goggled skier I was waiting for looked like.

Ah, yes. There he was in a blue and green coat and a dark blue helmet – with bright orange goggles that confirmed he was mine. Cranky, he was going fast. And he didn’t slow on approach. And… he’s heading right toward all those parents! I waited for the crash. Instead, Liam disappeared into the crowd, and I watched as parents’ heads jerked upward like bunny heads popping out of holes. Liam zig-zagged through the crowd, full throttle. “Hi, Mom,” he said casually, innocently as he stopped 18 inches away from me. Liam had seen my purple and pink plaid coat and skied to it. With absolutely no idea of the chaos he had created in the crowd. Liam will always ski from Point A to Point B, no matter how many classes he takes. Making only as many turns as necessary.

Did Instructor Snow teach Liam everything he needed to know?  I see a kinship in those smiles.

Have you seen my "shredder" look?

Glamour Aside

Outdoors is an equalizer.  If you do the outdoors, your body sweats and your hair is a mess.  This is Smuggler’s Notch, not Vail.  These are outdoor families and people that feel real. I like places like this and people who are comfortable being like this.  Dog walkers in Breakheart; bare-boaters sailing independently & living on a boat; scuba divers vacationing to dive all day & night; skiers on green runs; snow shoe-ers descending a mountain in the dark.

This is my outdoors persona this week:

I liken my look to Olympic “shredders” – even though I’m gliding my skis on gentle greens.  I know.  I’m taking extreme liberties in borrowing that term.  I’m 47.  I don’t snowboard.  But I do like pulling off the balaclava and knowing that massive hat head is OK here.

Much like Spring’s Gate Girl.

Skiing Smuggler's Notch, Vermont

This is February school break week, and we are skiing at Smuggler’s Notch in Vermont.  I booked the trip in early fall, superseding Bill’s trip to China this week.  He will make that trip early March instead. Good material for writing, but everyone in my family is within ten feet of me this Tuesday afternoon, so I’m writing in sentences.  Not stories.  Not even paragraphs.  Perhaps more fragments than sentences.

We skied in the northernmost part of winter storm Rex today.  Rex sat on top of the highest mountain here for most of the morning, looking like a gray mountain on top of the mountain upon which he cast his shadow.  That’s the mountain where Will and Bill skied.

I can be openly happy about snow here.  It’s a ski resort.  Happiness is snow.

There was no line at the entrance for the magic carpet (aka: conveyor belt up the bunny hill), so I skied the bunny hill after putting Liam in lessons.  Lessons that would take him halfway up the mountain with Rex howling.  I felt a little guilty about that.

I nearly fell over once, making my premiere entrance on the magic carpet.

After five or six times down the bunny hill, I nearly cleared out a class of 4-year-olds.  I felt a little guilty about that.  I crossed over to the chair lift.

New stress: Please, don’t let me wipe out my chair mate when I get off the chair.  I didn’t.  Manhattan and I rode up together twice.  His wife was on the same big mountain as Bill, and their 8-year-old son was in lessons.  We agreed skiing green runs is relaxing.  And this green was lovely and gentle.

I fell over once, tripped up the steps going to the condo to get my phone.  Ski boots work best in skis, not on narrow stairs.

Red-cheeked Liam was waiting with his instructor after my second and last run of the day.  Gloves off, Liam was eating snow.  This child has been eating snow since his first winter in the U.S., 2007.  I joined him last snowfall; I had forgotten how a big mouthful of fresh, white snow makes a snowball in your mouth.  Liam lies dazed on the ground sucking these as if they are the sweetest candy ever concocted.  While asleep, his vision of sugar plums must be pure white.

More fragmented thoughts from now, Wednesday morning.  At the dinner table last night, we shared highlights of our day.  Liam only ate snow after ski lessons; his group of 13 worked on turns, particularly j-turns which bring you to a stop if you are going too fast.  No, I did not make a special request to the instructor for Liam’s lesson.

Will skied through trees and needs poles.  He skied through the “glades” where you aren’t allowed to go unless there are three of you.  He knows triple-black diamonds are out of the question because there also need to be three people skiing together to go down those.  I don’t think he’s worked out why “three” is the magic number.  I just did.  Ski math.

Tonight, Bill and I are taking a chairlift to the top of Sterling Mountain and having dinner in a cabin with no power – a candlelit dinner heated with propane burners.  Then, we will snow shoe down the mountain.  40 minutes in the dark with floppy shoes.  I will find time and place to write that story.

Take a look at my "shredder" persona in Glamour Aside & the Recap of Smuggler's Notch.

Stickers

When you were 5 years old, what did you say when someone gave you a sticker book? I loved sticker books: Pulling off stickers and finding the right page where that particular shape needed to be stuck. Stickers as rewards weren’t in fashion yet. Now, the dentist’s office, grocery store, and school have stickers galore which are handed out for grand accomplishments: Didn’t cry at the dentist’s office. Didn’t melt down in the check-out lane. Didn’t disrupt the class. To the Malcolm boys, reward stickers are not effective.

Neither Will nor Liam like stickers. They are sensitive to the adhesive, finding it down right offensive. However, neither mind getting their hands sticky – just not having adhesive things stuck to their hands. No burning through Sponge Bob Band-Aids in this house.

Both have adapted to our sticker-infested society. Pointing to his chest, Liam says, “Sure, put it right here on my shirt.” The sticker dealer is left to maneuver the adhesive. Will takes the sticker, and graciously says, “Thank you”; then walks out with the sticker backing intact. After one such occasion, to Will I said, “Honey, you don’t have to take it. Just say ‘no thanks.’”

Then, I started paying attention to how obsessed sticker dealers are with making sure at least one sticker goes home with my children. “You don’t want one? Are you sure?? Here, take a couple! Really, it’s OK – you can have them!!” The boys have worked out one general solution: Take a sticker or two, and the sticker dealer relents; then the sticker is ditched in the van. Or it goes with the shirt into the washer.

Yes, stickers are a bit like a picnic with ants. We don’t want the ants, but sometimes it’s easier to leave them be rather than to continually flick them off of our favorite quilt on a hot summer’s day.

Small Wild Animals

Growing up as the oldest of four on a dairy farm, I held down the fort in the house while Mom milked cows morning and night.  Dad worked second shift at a meat processing plant so that we could survive on the farm, which usually left Mom with the twice-daily milking of our small Holstein herd. Watching my siblings must have been uneventful, or I’ve just mentally blocked that part of my life, since I don’t have any significant memories of those days.  Well, except for two incidents involving wild animals in the house.  And on the farm, any animal in the house was wild because animals lived outside.  All of them, including cats and dogs.

The first incident was when I was around 10 years old.  One evening, my sister and I saw a mouse run along a wall in the kitchen.  Post high-pitched screaming, we decided to take care of it before Mom came in from milking the cows, for we couldn’t stand the thought of it running around for another hour.  We found a snap-trap, put some cheese on it, set it, and pushed it near the mouse-path.  We moved to the mouse-free living room and waited – half hoping nothing would happen until Mom come into the house.  But there it was… SNAP!  We flew to the kitchen and immediately hopped on chairs and screamed, watching the mouse flop around in the trap.  My story ends here; I continued screaming apparently with my eyes closed.  I don’t know if my sister, or Mom, or perhaps even my baby brothers, scooped the trap into the dustpan and launched it outside the back door.  I only remember the noise of the incident – our screams and the snap – and my approximate size relative to the chair I was standing on.

One winter evening, when I was around the same size, a larger rodent disrupted the house while Mom was milking.  The faint smell of a skunk grew so intensely and so quickly, I was absolutely positive the animal was in the house spraying.  Panicked, I got coats on my sister and my brothers and hustled them out the back door, around the corner of the house, and 30 yards across the barnyard toward the warm lights of the barn.  I popped open the upper and lower barn doors and the warmth of the cows washed over us.

Ahhh, safety.  Surprising Mom with bundled up kids, I explained about the skunk in the house.  Mom’s incredulous look spoke to me before her voice.  The strong smell had taken my imagination to a place of undeniable realism.  Standing in the barn, it dawned on me that there had never been a skunk in the house before this.  And, that I had just taken my sister and brothers ever so close to the skunk’s path by trudging them to the barn.

I learned from those lessons.  Similar events have taken place in our current house with Bill and me.  I take care of the mice; they are still cute creatures to Bill.  Getting his American citizenship didn’t change his feelings toward mice.  He’s still English through and through when it comes to rodents and spiders (aka: scoop and save).

The one time we both thought there was a skunk inside the house, I took the kids upstairs to our bedrooms and sent Bill in search of skunks in the basement.  On second thought, it may have just been me that was convinced there was a skunk in the basement.  Convinced that our basement door must have been left open.  Yeah... pretty sure that was just me.

Yet, Bill took the helm and went scouting for skunks.  And came back without rabies.

(Bill is an Englishman; we had very different childhoods -- Uncovering the Real England: Spiders paints one picture of the way we view life, particularly bugs.)

Burnt Bacon

The last batch in my kitchen has a 50-50 chance of burning. Cookies... pancakes... bacon. I don’t cook bacon on the stovetop, too messy. If I plan well enough in advance, I like to bake it in the oven. Otherwise, I microwave it. I’ve microwaved bacon often enough to usually get that nice, brown, crispy state on the left side of the plate. The right side of the plate is when I thought it needed to be just a bit crispier, so I pushed the 2-minute button on my way to the eggs in the skillet. It was the last batch of bacon. I nearly swooned when I opened the microwave. Simultaneously, the smell of Grandma Murphy’s farm kitchen whooshed over me and Granddad Mills' words rolled triumphantly off my lips, “When it’s brown it’s cooking, and when it’s black it’s done!” A vision of Grandma’s black iron skillet on the stove followed. Then the microwave plate landed on the counter next to Liam.

“I’m not eating that. And black is not done. It's burnt.”

“You’re not eating that: I am. And black bacon is just crunchy; it’s not burnt.”

And it's a delicacy on bread with lots of catsup.

And you would never say ‘I’m not eating that’ to Grandma.

And you would sit next to Granddad and eat blackened food, happily crunching away, just like he did. Fully thankful for the hands that prepared it.

My memory often lapses, but smells and tastes can take me to places in the past over and over again.

(So...Would you eat the bacon on the right?  By the way, have you met my grandparents? Memories of them still keep my life in perspective.  And, just for kicks, here's an old bacon story.)