I can keep myself upright on level ground well enough, but this mountain biking stuff that people around here do is intense. And because we live in a mountain valley, most of the trails go straight up about 1,000 or so feet, and then straight back down.

I am truly awful at it. I fall off the bike. I hurt myself. And I don’t like to continually remind myself that I’m actually incapable of riding a bike, so I don’t do it. I don’t mountain bike. And I am probably the only person in this county who doesn’t.

This is a problem because my husband not only mountain bikes, he is the mountain biking poster child. He thinks every problem a woman could possibly have is easily solved by spending just a little time in the saddle of a mountain bike.

“I’ve not been sleeping well.”

“That’s because you don’t spend enough time mountain biking.”

“I’m sad, and I don’t know why.”

“I’m telling you. You need to start mountain biking.”

“I’m not sure what to make for the fifth grade-end-of-the-year picnic.”

“You should go out for a bike ride. The answer will come to you.”

“I feel like you answer my concerns only with the words ‘mountain bike.’”

“Well, if you would just start mountain biking.”

To hear him talk, if everyone would just bike in the summer and ski up mountains in the winter, we’d all be twirling about and making necklaces from hemp and dandelion stems, all the time.

He is genuinely sold on it, and he does tend to be a genuinely happy guy, so I decide, once again, that it’s time to give it a try. I decide to go out one morning and…mountain bike.

My husband wants to come along on this ride, but I know this will only make me nervous and that it will not, in the end, be any good for our relationship.

No, I will go all alone, to build my confidence.

He lends me his mountain bike, and I go.

I take off in the morning as soon as I load the kids on the school bus. The earth and the air are cool, and I set off up a lonely, winding mountain road, hoping to see no one. I feel meek and stupid and self conscious with my butt perched high on this tiny seat, which is dwarfed by anything that sits atop it.

I’m wearing a pair of brown Circo-brand twill capris from Target, and a cotton T-shirt – not the form fitting lycra or chamois or whatever everyone who knows what they are doing tends to wear.

Why, I wonder, does everyone need a uniform for everything? Even the biking hobbyists who ride only on the weekends have a dress code with their matching lycra shorts and jerseys emblazoned with the names of faux sponsors like “Colorado Cyclist” and “Clif Bars” and “Powerade.” If I had such a jersey, which I never would, it would say “Dunkin Donuts” or “Sudafed.”

No. These ordinary, everyday clothes are just fine for a simple girl like me.

Now, at my husband’s insistence, I do have some pretty fancy bike shoes to fit the pedals. These are pedals that you clip into with a locking device that is affixed to the bottom of your shoes.

My husband swears it’s the only way to go. He says it creates a more uniform motion for the bike and allows you to be productive on both your upstroke and your downstroke. “You just have to get used to it,” he says, “because you are actually one with your bike, but if you’re going to wreck, you simply unclip. It’s a piece of cake. You’ll just twist your ankle to the side before you strike the ground and, viola.”

“So, you’re saying that, on the way down, I need to be able to think and respond quickly enough to detach from the bicycle so it doesn’t land on me, tangling my legs in shards of twisted metal.”

“Yeah, but you’ll see, it’s easy.”

Easy peasy. What could go wrong?

Truly, this scares the crap out of me. I don’t tell him so, but I plan to ride with my feet balancing on the tiny pegs that are supposed to go into the shoes, instead of actually clipping into the pedals, just until I build up my confidence.

I have made it to the trailhead, which, mercifully, is devoid of cars, and I make my way down through the gate that stops cars from sharing this old mining road with mountain bikes. I signal and call to the dogs and find immediately that I need to cross a river (my husband would call it a stream, but it is a river) and I start pedaling upward.

I ride out of the heavy tree cover, emerging from the shadows into a patch of sunlight, I am breathing hard, sweat tickles my scalp under my helmet. I feel so alive all of a sudden. I look at the peaks all around me and I wonder how on earth I have lived in this mountain valley – this mountain biking mecca – for so long and haven’t been doing this every single day of my life.

I survey the trail that rises before me. It’s heavy with rocks unearthed from a recent violent storm, and the road is part way washed out, so I go to the side of the trail despite the steep drop off the side because it is well worn there. I think of my husband telling me that this is why he loves to bike so much: you get into a zone, you have to pick your path, you have to be in the moment, you have to choose the correct way through the trees and roots and rocks and you spend all that time out of your own head.

I see the tire tracks of other mountain bikes through the dirt here, meaning that – finally, I am picking the right path. Yes! I can do this. I engage my shoes in the clip-in pedals. These don’t scare me any longer. I pedal harder, The mountain air fills my lungs.
I am mountain biking.

And then, suddenly, I am not.

My bike has stopped. Mid pedal. Mid crank. It has just ceased to move. I am confused. For a moment I am suspended and time slows as I look about to see what is going to happen next. Somehow I have time to I scan the ground, and the sharp dropoff just to my right, which is the direction I am sure to fall. Then I’m seeing it up close as I hold my hands out to protect my face against the looming, jagged rocks. And then I close my eyes for impact.

When I open them, I am pinned by my shoes to the bike, which is somehow still on the trail while I am lying in a vertical fashion down the mountainside to the north. This means I must do a full ab crunch to get up to the point where I can try to twist my shoe out of the pedals. Worse, on the way down my pants have ripped, whether from something on the bike or on the pointy rocks atop which I am lying.

Not only have my pants ripped but my underwear is in shreds, as well. This is completely unexplainable to me, but also undeniable, because I feel a very chill breeze on my butt, the one part of my body I never want hanging out in the breeze.

So I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but I am quite obscene as I lie there, particularly because I am upside down. So, I discover, this is why people don’t wear loose fitting cotton twill pants when they mountain bike.

Once back on the trail, I realize that my chain had broken in two.

Later, my husband tells me with a relaxed chuckle, that I should have been equipped with the proper tools and then I could have simply taken the pin out of another part of the chain and reconnected it and continued my ride. But, in my ignorance and through my tears, I decided it was done for. Besides, I was much more worried about the nakedness.

Did I mention that my ass is completely bared?

Let me tell you a few things about this butt of mine: It is one of those parts of my body that I am ever feeling the need to do something about. Does it need a good buffing? Do I need to get it polished? Liposuction, perhaps? Or do I need to just surrender to it and give thanks to the generations of bubble-butted ancestors for my pronounced posterior profile. I’m not a large woman, really. I feel pretty good about the rest of my size 6/8 frame, but this butt… It just sits there high atop my legs, jiggly and strange. It’s one of the reasons I’m running and mountain biking, to help my butt not be so jiggly and strange – and yet here I am. Ride number one and the jiggly, strange butt is hanging out all over the place.

I wonder how many people I will see before I get back to my car, which suddenly feels a very, very long ways away.

Oh, right. It is.

I pull on my tiny t shirt with all my strength but it doesn’t stretch past my beltloops.

I make a plan. If I see people in front of me, I’ll slouch forward and walk with my legs very close together. If I see people behind me, I’ll contort myself into a backwards slouch or pretend I dropped something off in the woods and I’ll dash off to look for it.

If people are coming toward me and behind me at the same time, I shall lie down on the ground and cover myself with my bicycle and perhaps with pine needles and leaves and grasses. Also, I will try very hard not to cry.

I coast down most of the hill, as I decide that sitting on the bike seat and pretending that nothing is amiss offers the best coverage of all. One does not need a chain to coast, I discover. Smile and wave. Just smile and wave. I pass a few people, I smile and wave, and I feel pretty good. When you have a great secret and the people you pass have absolutely no idea, it’s genuinely satisfying.

Genuinely.

But then I reach the bottom of the hill and I find that I must get off the bike. It simply won’t coast any farther.

Instantly I see a dude out walking his dogs. He is 25 or so and has a smirk on his face. It’s hard to tell if the smirk is because he sees a sweating, red-faced, bare-assed middle aged lady or if it’s his natural way of things. I decide it’s the latter. He’s more concerned about not letting his Australian Shepards jump all over me. I play it cool, smile and bid him a good morning as I pass. I am hoping so hard that he doesn’t turn around for any reason as he passes me, and then take a video of me and my bare ass winking in the morning light and post in on YouTube. (I have never checked to see if he did, so please, if anyone discovers it, do NOT tell me.)

I make it to my car. And after I get home, and I change my pants, I tell the story to my 12 year old who is sitting on the front porch beading a necklace. She looks at me with genuine concern, touches my hand with softness, tenderness, and grace – and she says, “Oh mom. That didn’t build your confidence, did it? Tomorrow’s ride will be better.”

I love that kid. And, yes, tomorrow’s ride will be better. Because I’m buying some granny panties today. Also, lycra shorts, a new bike chain, a sweatshirt that hangs past my knees. It’s just really a shame the bike shop doesn’t stock muscular coordination – or dignity.

His extreme athletic adventures call for an extra layer of insulation on his face. It really has kept him from getting frostbite on some of those longer ski races. But in the summer, it all goes away, and I get to see his glorious face and skin for a whole 6 months before he buries them in whiskers once again.

I can’t wait. I’ve actually had it on my calendar. He does this thing each year on shaving day where he doesn’t just shave it off all at once, but instead goes through a series of stages with corresponding character reenactments. First maybe a long Fu Manchu and then a silly moustache and then he takes on different persona to go along with them, and this cracks me up. The mustache stage in particular.

What’s weird about mustaches is how they are so terribly rodent-like.

I knew this guy in college and when he drank too much he would walk around trying to stroke and pet everyone’s eyebrows. He’d laugh and say they felt just like baby gerbils. And if eyebrows are baby gerbils, then mustaches are like adult-size hamsters. Or, on some people, lithe little chipmunks and, on certain others, fat, lazy wombats.

Whatcha got on your face there?

What does it like to eat?

Because there’s always something – some kind of crumb lingering in there if you look closely enough. And if you look too closely, you’ll see there’s something perhaps coming out of the nose or the mouth onto the face.

And even if you can’t see something, that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything in there.

I know this because my little dog likes to nibble on my husband’s hairy face, and her little tail wags just so, and you know she’s finding tiny tasty morsels.

Of course, my man isn’t one to shampoo it. He’s one of those guys with the real manly-man body and facial hair. Not the groomed kind but the bushy, I’m-a-man-and-I-like-my-own-stink kind.

I think if I were a dude I would be one of those types of dudes, too. I can see the appeal of that – the allure of being gross and letting yourself be gross because you’re a dude and you’re supposed to be gross.

But back to shaving day.

Today, the furry flat hamsters that hide my husband’s beautifully chiseled jaw and cheekbones all winter long are going away. He will shave it into a long-handled mustache, just like the title role in My Name is Earl. And he will twist it in his fingers and he will cock one eyebrow and look at me all Smoky-and-the- Bandit and he will ask me if I want to take a ride in his Camaro.

And, of course, I will.

Just in case you’d like to make some mustache crafts here are some.

From as early as I can remember, I wanted to be Charles Kuralt, and I’m pretty embarrassed but also a little proud to say that I didn’t even know who Martha Stewart was until I was a junior in college and this kid who was very clearly gay yet pretended to ask me out anyway and who, on our date, cooked a perfect dish of fettucine alfredo and treated me to a videotaped demonstration of Martha Stewart ironing and folding fitted sheets.

Until that day, I thought everyone wadded up those bottom sheets and threw them to the top of the linen closet like I did. I bet that’s how Charles Kuralt would have done it. He wouldn’t have had time for any ironing and folding, with all the people on the road to meet; all the stories still to tell.

I have three kids and a husband and my life is now a whole lot more Martha than it is like Charles. I find that, over time, I’ve been able to domesticate myself, like a cat – or maybe it’s more appropriate to say that I’ve been able to break myself, like a horse.

For the simple reason that I can’t stand to pay 12 bucks for an overcooked burger and French fries boiled in old grease to eat from a table that makes my forearms feel sticky before the food comes, I learned how to cook things my very own self. For the simple reason that I’m the only one who seems to mind when things are grimy and cluttered, I’m very often the one who cleans up.

But right now – on those “off” days when I allow myself to be brutally honest – I’m feeling sort of stuck in this life. My husband has a job he can’t leave for long. My kids can’t stand to miss school.

My kids are good students. My husband is great at what he does. Both of these things are pluses for the long term health and well-being of my family, which is my life. And so, for now, this is my adventure. No Charles adventures for me right now. It’s going to have to be Martha.

My kids are 9, 11, and 13, and the every day is an adventure of sorts. Why, just today, I painted a few baseboards as well as the windowsills in my kitchen, and I consoled my husband when he accidentally ran over his $3,000 mountain bike with his truck. I cleaned up breakfast, and I used the socket set (the one that my beloved once, with a straight face, gave me for Mother’s Day) to crank off the filter from the bottom of the dishwasher in order to fish out grapefruit seeds, pistachio shells and lollipop wrappers that were making the thing not run right.

My kids are on spring break, and, so, the adventure continues as my son leads his merry band of 9-year old friends into my house to work on some crafts.

“Work on some crafts” is code for “mess around with hot glue.”

A better mom is perhaps always genuinely happy to see her kids’ friends. She greets them with interested smiles, polite and enthusiastic conversation and even, I’m told, fresh cookies.

On the outside, I strive to do the same, but, I must admit that, sometimes, I regard the kids I see walking through my front door only in terms of their Personal Mess Potential Quotient (PMPQ).

Oh, that kid, he’s clean. Oh, that kid spits and farts and says “bring it on, fat guy,” when he gets too excited. That kid makes my entire house smell like little boy. That kid will dump absolutely any tub of Legos he sees. He simply can’t help himself. That kid doesn’t wipe his nose and his face still has yogurt on it from breakfast and you don’t know where one ends and the other begins and then he stands by my curtains and all of a sudden, his face is clean and that makes me want to barf.

My son and his friends – they leave a bit of a mess.

They have gotten out all of the googly eyes and pipe cleaners and puff balls and yarn from the craft closet and then they cut the pizza boxes from the recycling closet into tiny pieces and then they hot glue it all together into a heap and then they throw it at one another.

The giggling and sptting and farting has begun. “Bring it on, fat guy!” the little blonde one shrieks. It doesn’t get any more fun than this. Until, that is, they sprinkle the mess across the floor and kick some of it under the fridge, making sure to stream their little wet and sticky little hands along the tacky high gloss paint on the windowsills as they leave. The PMPQ is running high today.

I have a friend who is good at using humor in just about every situation. She told me once that she was getting good and fed up with telling her husband to stop leaving his dirty tighty whities wherever they fell off his legs, so she took to stuffing it under his pillow every time she found it lying around. She made her point without having to say a word.

So maybe I’ll sprinkle some of these treasures across my son’s pillow. A few shreds of cardboard. Some yarn bits. One or two stringy trails of glue. Maybe he’ll get the notion that a mess doesn’t disappear on its own. Maybe he’ll all of a sudden realize that someone cleans it up so he can have someplace to sit and maybe to eat later in the day.

On second thought, maybe I’ll just hot glue all of this mess together into a great big heaping ball. That would be kind of fun.

Bring it on, fat guy!

She has a tan, small face and tiny features like a mouse or a squirrel. There is a smattering of freckles across her nose like someone has been flinging wild oats out to the horses.

Like her mama, she needs her quiet time. If she gets overwhelmed, she might really let you have it, yelling and screaming at one moment, then taking a moment alone to recollect herself and then reemerging moments later like some kind of beautiful, kind, sweet thing. A thing transformed.

“Oh, hello. I love you,” she will say when she comes back to herself, even if she never left but has been standing in front of you the entire time.

Despite what I have just told you, everyone would say that she has charisma and a calm soul. Even when she was first born, she would look not at you, but through you. She isn’t afraid to hold a person’s gaze. “Wow,” my friends would say to her when they held her as a baby, “Whatever do you see in there? In the deepest darkest depths of my soul?”

She still isn’t afraid of looking into people. She never backs down and she never looks away. She can look at you, swallow you up, understand what you are really all about, your fears, your darkness, all the bad things that you could do and then she loves you anyway.

From the moment I held her as a newborn, I thought to myself – and this is a strange thing for a mom to think about the baby she had birthed moments before – I’m not sure this baby needs me. She’ll just humor me for awhile.

We joke (not to her face) that she is a cat in a family of dogs. She doesn’t feel the need to slobber on you or kiss your ass, like the rest of us do. She rarely even feels the need to answer you when she is called. She would just as soon lie in the sun and scratch herself. She will answer you when she is good and ready. She moves through life, catlike and stretchy. Lithe and animalistic.

She is an amazing piece of work. She is a pure and happy thing. When she walks, she skips. Sometimes she locks her elbows and swings her fists, little pendulums that propel her down the street. It is her way.

And when she is on her bike and going really fast, she can’t stop herself from giggling. Great peals of laughter rip out of her.

I love her. She loves me. And that’s how it will be forever and ever. Amen.

So we’re sitting at the table mowing down this bag of grapefruit and my kids are extolling its virtues. They squeeze the fruit into their bowls and then slurp it up.

My husband says, “It’s great fruit, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s really fantastic,” I say.

My son says, “I love it, but the name is weird. I mean, it’s nothing like a grape. And a grape is already a fruit.”

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries,” I say.

“Wait a second,” my husband says, “Is it grapefruit – or greatfruit?”

“Are you pulling my leg?” I laugh, but, alas, he is earnest.

The expression on his face is quizzical. “Well, which is it?”

My 12 year old daughter looks down at her bowl of juice and shakes her head. “Oh, dad.”

I take out the sack from the fridge because he’s likely to not believe me without proof. “5 pounds of Texas Sweet ruby red grapefruit.” I brandish the label.

“Huh. Well, would you look at that.”

“In all your 38 years, did this never come up?”

“I kind of remember someone laughing at me and correcting me, once. In my teens,” he reflects. “But it truly IS great. And I like that name for it more. So I think I forgot that it was really grapefruit. To me, it will always be greatfruit. It should be greatfruit.”

Reality be damned. It really should be.

The thing is, I honestly can’t tell if he’s kidding. Did he know it was ‘grapefruit’ all along? My husband is rather a visionary. He has a brain that is so sharp and so creative – and also so focused – that ordinary things – such as which side of the envelope the stamp goes on – completely escape his notice.

He has a friend like this as well. His name is Steve and, years ago, he came to spend a few days with us. On his last day, he insisted on making us dinner. He went to the market and brought back a number of ingredients, including a do-it-yourself pizza dough in which you add water, press to the pan, add toppings and serve.

Steve banged around for a bit in our galley kitchen and soon had the pizza in the oven. After 20 minutes, he checked the pizza, but the crust “wasn’t quite there,” he said. Twenty more minutes. Nope, that crust still needed more time.

After an hour, I went to take a look. I opened the oven door to a mass of pasty goo topped with watery cheese and oozy sauce dripping off the pan, down the rack, and into the oven below. There was also smoke and a funny smell.

“Huh,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like that.”

“I think I must have done something wrong,” Steve explains. “The crust recipe said to add a cup of water, but it didn’t say what size cup.” He fishes a 64 ounce tumbler out of the sink.

Judging by the bubbling crud all over the inside of my oven, he really had added 8 times the amount of water he was supposed to.

To this day, a decade later, my husband swears it was a joke. He swears that Steve had known all along and had done all this to mess with me. We shall never know.

But I know that my husband knew the word was grapefruit.

Didn’t he?

More than one of us mothers at my table notice this, but we live in a resort town, where young men such as these tend to drink Tequila or Wild Turkey or Jim Beam all night, stopping only when dawn signals that it is time for some grub. It is not all that unusual to see a guy passed out at the breakfast table. And who are we to judge?

A moment later, I look up to see this guy sliding against his friend and then sliding right out of his chair onto the floor. Limp as a spaghetti noodle, but altogether more pale and pasty-looking. His forehead and lips are covered with white goo and there’s thick red fluid under his nose and dripping down his neck. Is he dead? I ask.

We’re not sure, but, certainly, he is down. On the floor. And yet his friends keep eating. They’re still chewing away on their breakfast. One of them registers a mild sort of alarm, more of a calm attention, really, as he stands up to get a closer look at the guy who had, until moments before, been seated at the table in front of him.

Meanwhile, the ladies at my table, none of whom has any medical background whatsoever, launch themselves nimbly to his side. One lady completely clears away the tables and chairs near the poor boy. Another is grilling his friends about his health history: allergies and his history of seizures and the like. Another is instructing the waitress to call 911. Another is rolling up her sweatshirt to put behind the head of this young man, who keeps looking up and then slamming his head back into the floor in confusion. My other friend is wiping his face with her napkin (and it is she who discovers that what we are looking at is not blood and foam but ketchup and white sauce from his biscuits and gravy.) My other friend is rubbing his head gently with her cool touch and speaking in her softest angelic mama voice as his eyes flutter open and closed. I think he, too, is wondering if he were dead.

His friends are still sitting in their chairs, spreading jam on toast. I get the sense that we are in a parallel universe – one in which their friend is dying but they are only watching it on television.

We get up from his side when the paramedics arrive. He is sucking on oxygen for a good 15 minutes before the greenish gray pallor cedes from his face and he can sit again.

My Texan friend says, “If this ever happens to me and you all keep eating your breakfast, then we are not friends anymore.” I believe her.

As they are leaving, the young men who are left standing stop by our table and they say, “Thank you all so much for helping us there. We didn’t know what to do. Are you all a bunch of nurses or something?”

“No,” we say, all at once. “We are Mamas.”

Photo by Vinni123, on Flickr

When the economy took a dive, quite a few people in my town went looking for new digs. It’s a mass exodus, really. The other day, I came across an old Girl Scout roster from two years ago and saw that, in that time, more than half of our sweet Brownie troop has moved away.

One family went to Florida, where they somehow ride roller coasters just about every day. One went to go and live at grandma and grandpa’s beach home. One family is setting off this week for ports unknown, though I’m told it’s most likely to be Cambodia, where they figure their feet will be warm and they’ll be able to really stretch their few remaining dollars.

I told my husband the other day that if I didn’t have three kids and two dogs, this might be the time when I would want to move on. Uproot myself and start over. Ride some roller coasters or some rickshaws.

It would make me feel younger, certainly. It would make me worry less about whether I unplugged the iron or whether my son is getting enough vitamin c or whether my kids are brushing their teeth enough or if their world will be forever marred because I lose track of how long it has been between their baths. If we were in Cambodia, I’d have new things to worry about.

When I was young, I dreamed of living my entire life as a vagabond. A life in which I could travel and meet new people and write down their stories, and I wouldn’t have to do any of those things I saw my mother doing. Fretting over the tomato stains in the Tupperware. Inviting the neighbors over for coffee and pastries while exchanging techniques for properly plumping the raisins in the cinnamon rolls. Getting left behind in the kitchen after dinner with a mess.

That life was not for me, I had decided as a girl. I dreamed to be relaxed and capricious. Wayward and rootless.

But now that my kids are the age that I was then, I find that I love quite a few of my ways and even one or more of my roots.

Still, I tell myself, the time is coming in the not-so-distant future when my kids will be needing me less, and that’s when I’ll pull up some of those roots. Change my ways.

Those will be my vagabond days. And I will have so deserved each and every one.

Photo by muha…,T on Flickr

Sometimes we look for earth-shattering, far-reaching, stunning and tremendous ways to change the world. Friends are reaching out to Rwandan refugees, but I do not. Friends are running races to raise awareness for the plight of women in the Congo. But I do not. While I admire them and their ways of reaching out and spreading their love and caring and kindness into the world, this is not my way. At least not today. At least not this moment. At least not during this season of my life.

For me, today, I write my small words and I raise my small kids, and I do many small things that I write about here. Things that no one (besides you, dear readers) will ever know that I do.

To take an example, here is one small thing that I am about to do: It is a small daily task that I am convinced is one of the easiest ways to infuse more love and joy and happiness into the world, and that is to reach for the leashes that hang on the nail by the wall. My Jack Russell gets so excited that she springs 4 feet in the air to give me kisses. Then she hangs from the collar of my Labrador like a warm, fuzzy pendant. So happy is she to be out in the world with me.

For now, this will have to be enough. And it is.

A few of my favorite wintry things:

The swoosh of my cross country skis as they sail along on heaps of powder; the towering Engelman spruce with their lofty snowy hats and puffy snowy sleeves that bestow water for my kids, who occasionally drag their tongues along them as we ski by; my terrier, Lucy, in her prissy pink sweater, tearing ferociously after ground squirrels and chipmunks.

Lest you think it’s all about skiing, it’s also the way my foot slides into a boot that fits just so; it’s friends with woodstoves and crackling logs; it’s the crunch and squeak of snow under my new, miraculous Finnish snowtires. It’s bustling, cheery, hollering holiday crowds; it’s avoiding bustling, cheery, hollering holiday crowds. It’s a fleece blanket. It’s vanilla spice. It’s making tea bread studded with whole, fresh cranberries.

It’s the white etched on the blue.

Which brings me back to skiing: the way my sharp exhalations shape my hair into spidery ice webs; when it’s so cold the air cracks and gives my body a new energy to move. The energy that comes only when it’s this cold; it gets me the same as the sizzle on my skin in the summertime. It is aliveness and power.

We have a Thanksgiving tradition in my family that I’m not so very thankful for.

It’s called the Gratitude Circle, and I’m not grateful for it because it is this tradition that makes it so my parents and brother don’t share Thanskgiving Dinner with me and my husband and my kids and my in-laws’ bold band of merrymakers. No, they would rather dine alone than share intimate thoughts with a crowd of people they see only once a year.

As you might imagine, in the Gratitude Circle, we gather just before dinner and we all hold hands – all 34 of us – and we go around the circle, taking turns making little speeches about what we’re thankful for. This can take 30 or so minutes, and as you also might imagine, in the meantime, turkey gets cold. Gravy congeals. Rolls harden. The pre-dinner beer buzz wears off.

One guest dims the light and cues music when it’s her turn. Her children are always weeping, also right on cue.. “I…”sniff, sniff, “am thankful for my family…” sniff, sniff. Other people prepare notecards with quotes from Meister Eckhart and Maya Angelou.

I’ve long suspected that my own shy kids would prefer to run for the hills like my parents and my brother, but they don’t know any different. The Gratitude Circle is every bit a part of their Thanksgiving as cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. There has never been a time in their lives when we didn’t do it, because we have always had dinner with my mother-in-law and she eats up this kind of thing. The more melodrama, the better. Everyone is trying to dramatize and outdo.

Now that my kids are getting older, they are beginning to show that maybe they are taking after my side of the family. My 11-year-old daughter says, “I’m grateful and all, but why do we all have to cry about it?”

My 9-year old daughter says, “Can I just say I’m grateful for Chicken Noodle Soup?”

It’s not that we’re not grateful for life and for a large loving family and for the beauty that surrounds us each and every day. It’s that we feel more comfortable sharing those personal, private gratitudes with a small circle indeed. So to get into the spirit of the holiday, we each give ourselves three minutes to jot down some gratitudes, for our very own eyes only, and none of which we shared with the multitudes on Thanksgiving Day.

Here are a few of mine:

redhots on sugar cookies

grandma’s caramel corn

cinnamon

snickerdoodles with soft buttery centers

the way my son looks at me like I’m WonderWoman

pomegranates so ripe they drip down your hands

warm gloves

used bookstores

my daughter Joy’s musical giggle

blowing steam from the top of my coffee

the way snow captures the light in a thousand different ways and winks it back to you – the same way the ocean does when the sun shines just right and makes you believe in magic

the smell of vanilla

warm mugs

puppies with their warm little bellies and sweet warm puppy breath

the skittery sound of snow hitting my windowpanes when my kids and husband are home safe and warm and we have no particular place to go

alone time

lemons

patches on sunshine on my carpet

bicycles

my glorious bed

fleece

honesty

kindness

belly laughs

a pint shared with friends

the way my face tingles after a good hard backcountry ski.

And chicken noodle soup.