Ha HAH! Momma Can SKI!

Or at least she can try. She's going to try. Tomorrow. Or the next day. But for sure, she's going to try.

In truth, this won't be the first time I did the snow-bunny-thing. Nope. The first time I set myself on two strips of wood–all wrapped up in a thousand pounds of goose feathers for warmth–and careened down a snow packed hill was about twenty years ago.

Wait! That's a lie. The first time was like thirty years ago in Germany at the top of the Zugspitze, and it turned out to be seriously traumatizing because no one told me how to ski or most important how to stop not to mention there was a blizzard and the announcements that the trams back down the mountain were on their final run were in German and the 14-year-old-future-momma-who-can't-ski couldn't understand them and was nearly left on the mountain to die. But that's another blog post. (Here, to be exact.)

But that twenty years ago ski-thing? Yeah. I totally did that. And it wasn't brilliant.

It's not that I didn't pick up on the whole concept of schussing and snowplowing and rooster-tailing. I did. And I got good enough to not be put on film for a Warren Miller ski movie. And probably not embarrass anyone I was with. It sort of felt natural to me, you know? Like dancing: a little bit of oppositional body movement: shoulders one way, hips the other, knees the third way, feet the fourth. It was cool. I liked it.

But I learned on ice, because we were in the midwest at the time and there weren't no actual mountains with real snow to learn to ski on. Plus I did it, as I mentioned, twenty years ago. Who knows what my body will do with that memory now? I could wind up like those balls of snow with arms and legs and ski poles sticking out everywhere that you see rolling down cartoon mountains on Saturday morning kid's shows.

Yeah. I fear my past experiences are not going to help my future.

This year we've got no snow at our little local resort (okay, it belongs to Robert Redford and is called Sundance, so, you know, not so little). Like, they have to spray it on. With snow machines. That are not so much snow machines as they are giant snowcone makers. And I am going to throw myself down that stuff sometime in the next two days. Which, as I mentioned, fills me with terror.

But I have to. No choice whatsoever. Why? My kidlets gave me Sad Eyes and Disappointed Voices when I said I was too old for it. What choice did I have? 

So, I'm going. It might kill me. I might break a hip. Or lacerate my face on the ice. Or lose a finger or two. But I'm going. I'm a little excited. Like the way you get when the pain of the little toe you just smashed on the corner of that stinkin' bench you have in the kitchen (why do you have it in the kitchen?) just begins to subside. I'm that kind of excited. Mostly because I'm skeered. But, in the immortal words of Sherlock Holmes as played by Robert Downey, Jr., we shall crack on. (Not to be confused with crack-out. Which is probably what's really going to happen.)

Right. Stiff upper lip, and all that. I'll get back to you and let you know how it goes, 'kay? Assuming I still have the use of my hands.

(In the event that I don't survive, I leave my blog to Nathan Bransford, former literary agent extraordinaire. Heaven knows, he needs one. Also Robert Redford. Because he's famous.)