(Day One, Truckee)
There's nothing much to take pictures of here anyway. Just snow, lots of it in all directions, peppered with smiling white people here and there. It is supposed to snow tonight. We will ski and snowboard again today. Then we will watch the snow fall tonight through the bay windows of our rental property, with the fire going. We will see what the result is tomorrow - either more skiing or none at all. The boy seems to have really attached to snowboarding, as I suspected he would. He had all-day instruction yesterday from a very patient expert in the emerging sport of snowboarding. They are everywhere here, the specialists. It is why some smart people hate things like this: the field of experts is already overpopulated with the worst kind of the intellectually incurious - the healthy and young.
Yesterday, after swimming a bit in the heated outdoor pool we (I, mainly) decided that we could take a shortcut through the snow to get back to our clearly visible temporary home. It wasn't very far to go, but the snow was much deeper than it first looked, and was also a very uphill climb. I had to take my shows off for fear of losing them in the snow, which was a good example to teach my son when it comes to doing stupid stuff in the snow. The snow was weakened underneath, so every step that mom took in front of me she sunk up to her waist. I tried to step in her footsteps but dad is much heavier than mom. I was sinking to my chest, in wet swimming shorts and no shoes. You get the idea. The boy seemed to love it. Mom, not nearly as much.
We survived. The boy instinctively latched onto the joy of being in the snow without shoes, to make sure there was not any confusion about exactly how right mom was. We are different sorts of frontier people.
I make it seem worse than it was. It was silly, borderline foolish. No one suffered more than myself, and that seemed fine with all of the witnesses.
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