My First Taste of Colorado
In seventh grade, my friend Leanne and I wrote boyfriend lists. These, of course, were the lists of qualifications a man would have to have to be our boyfriend. Drink deeply of the toxic sexuality culture that told us girls had to be interested in boys and people could meet expectations and there was one person for each other! Mmmmm smells like the empathy in the pages of Shameless (Nadia, we will forever be grateful).
Here’s a snippet of my list: Love Jesus. Loves me. (yes, in that order)—yes that part was written down!— Musical. Skier (not snowboarder). Looks good in a tux.
I’ve only pulled out that list since to laugh at it. Some things I anticipated: Jackson loves the hell out of me. Truly. And he looks f***ing incredible in a tux. He’s musical enough that if we produce children, they’re unlikely to be tone deaf (ok that’s an understatement - he’s actually surprisingly musical). He has a curiosity about God and God’s world that goes beyond my 12-year-old conviction that he should LOVE JESUS. I mean. Yeah. What can I say? I married the man of my dreams? Isn’t that rude to say? Well. Too late.
But folks! This was a momentous occasion! Jackson had visited Colorado and I had only dreamed of it for, I dunno, two decades. And of course I’ve been skiing since I could walk and Jackson had never clicked on those two flat boards and felt the freedom of flying down the mountain. He had snowboarded a handful of times (which I grew up calling ‘The Dark Side’ in a very admonishing Jedi voice). But he hadn’t really skied. Or at least we had never been skiing together.
Potato, in his apres wear
This was now a high-stakes trip. Jackson decided he would give skis a chance and I agreed he could swap to snowboarding if he hated them. When I asked if he wanted to sign up for lessons, he said, “well, I was hoping your roster wasn’t already full!” So this was to be, as we like to call it, a marriage-tester. Ya know, one of those things where you can so clearly see the possible endings at the beginning of the road, and you do it anyway like a choose your own adventure with one of several potential prewritten finales.
We got to see my dear friend from college, Haley, and her husband Jordan, who bailed us out when our non-sub-zero windshield wiper fluid froze in the tank. (We could not see. Why does non-sub-zero even exist?) Then, we arrived in Breckenridge with a few friends from our Nashville pod (we played it safe, y’all), got fitted for our rentals, unpacked our things into the cabin, and popped into the hot tub to plan how we’d use the freshly powdered hills the next two days. Because availability of ski passes (even with an Epic pass, as we found out) was difficult to come by, we decided to all ski Breck the first day and then Jackson and I would take off to try A Basin the second, which came highly recommended by our Colorado-ski-pro friends and neighbors, the Orners.
We had an EXCELLENT time! I was relieved and happy. Jackson started off stronger than we could have hoped on skis and by the end of day one was confidently cruising down a blue and green on his own. We ended the first day tired but content to have spent it with some great friends and on some great hills. I got to bomb down a couple black diamonds at the end of the day and found myself riding with a woman in her forties who was on the hill with her family and had been released by her husband to go do a couple ‘real runs’ while the rest of the fam did blues. We were both ecstatic and free women, flying and carving and feeling our thighs burn from underused muscles reawakened.
Jackson has officially caught the skiing bug. He was planning our next ski trip on the way back to the cabin, day two. Safe to say this marriage-tester had a happy ending and my inner twelve-year-old is cackling with gluttonous satisfaction like she knows she shouldn’t be.
Please, don’t pretend to be surprised that we stopped for celebratory beers. And Potato. That kid. He never can get enough pets: when you have one hand for beer, you have one hand for uninterrupted puppy pets, no?
After we packed up the cabin and our friends went on to ski another hill or return to the working world, we kicked off our winter road trip (yes I know I’m way, way overdue for sharing photos and memories from that but just deal, ok?)
More on the rest of the road trip later!
xo
em
