Skiing with Maya

Dear Maya,

I'll never get to teach your kids to ski.  I would have been so good at it too.  How to teach snow plow and parallel?: apple pie and french fries.  The memories of skiing with you come rushing back with a poignancy that is at once too painful and too beautiful to bear: the snow angels, Dilly Dally Alley, the half pipe, the search for the rickety bridge between Outrigger and Retta's, the Easter Bunny coloring contest and mad search for wet candy in the snow.

Skiing with you was always a bit scary. You were in control, but barely! Too bad Apple Tags weren’t invented yet. You really needed one in your pocket. To be more precise, we needed you to have one in your pocket. We lost you all the time, but you were never lost. Any gap in the woods beckoned for a fresh adventure.. Or you would diss us on purpose, and then later I would get a random call from a 303 area code: some stranger lent you her phone because you and your friend needed us to buy you food.

You were so awesome at skiing on just one ski; I was always carrying the other one down, getting weird looks from other people on the hill. You just needed to make the ski day a bit more interesting, I think. The way you lived your life; a little (or a lot) out of the ordinary.

You skied with such effortless grace, focus, and abandon. The same way you climbed, your friends tell me. 

-Mom