Vegetarian Ranchwife

This winter, Kem and I thought it would be a good idea to get on snowboards and join our kids on the mountain. It’s been at least fifteen years since we’ve been on a board, a point which I repeated to anyone who stood still long enough for me to get the words out.

I had never meant for so many years to lapse between snowboarding excursions. As I explained it to a man lacing up boots in the rental shop on the kids’ first day of skiing, when I still hadn’t committed to getting out on the slopes myself, “I used to go all the time, but then I got old and busy.”

“That’s no excuse,” he said, before he headed out with his own teenage son.

It’s true, it’s no excuse. The mountain is full of people my age and older, like the man in the rental shop. They all have full lives and still manage to bundle up kids, pack snacks and get out on the mountain. I can only blame the lapse on some form of time-blindness, which I’ve always considered a weakness of mine.

This isn’t the time-blindness that leads to being perpetually late. Though I am susceptible to that form, I’ve largely overcome it by carefully counting back each step it takes to get out the door. For example, to get my oldest to school at 7:45, we need to leave the house between 7:00 and 7:10, which means the kids need to start getting dressed between 6:40 and 6:45, and if they’re not at the door putting on shoes and backpacks by 6:55, I’m yelling. Most mornings I’m yelling.

I’m talking about a long-term time-blindness; the kind that led me to keep thinking through most of the 2010s that the ’90s were only ten years ago; the kind that brings on a shock when I hear Stone Temple Pilots’ “Plush,” a song I loved as teenager, on the Classic Rock station.

When I pulled our snowboarding gear out of the bin the night before our excursion, there, on my jacked was the lift ticket from January 2007, our last time snowboarding. Apparently we’d turned the fifteen year corner and heading to twenty.

As far as time blindness goes, mistaking seventeen years for fifteen years isn’t so bad, just a lapse of two years. But my gut had estimated the gap as ten years. I only corrected to fifteen because I knew I my last snowboarding excursion had taken place sometime before the birth of my thirteen-year-old. The lift ticket or the song on the radio is like that jarring look at the clock, reminding me that while I was lost in the shuffle of getting kids where they need to be, time kept moving steadily forward.

With short-term time blindness, I have to keep a constant eye on the clock. If I scroll through my news feed and get distracted, there will be yelling at the door. With long-term time blindness, the growth of my kids acts as my clock. When I’m trying to remember how long we’ve lived in this house, I just have to think of my middle daughters age (11). We moved in just a few months before she was born. Or when were we last in Southern California? In the pictures from Disneyland, the kids are 4, almost 6 and 8; that’s six years this summer. It’s been a minute; we need to get back.

Without kids, I’m pretty sure I’d lose entire decades. Maybe even get to the end of my life and wonder how I ran out of time to do all the things I was going to do. On a Saturday at the beginning of February, that thing I was going to do was snowboarding.

“Just like falling off a bike,” Kem said when we’d made it down the mountain in one piece.

We remembered how to turn a board down the snowy side of a mountain. The muscle memory had kicked in, although they felt all seventeen years of that gap. And there were little things I used to do without thinking that now demand my attention.

Years ago, when I was sitting in the snow at the top of a hill with a group of my snowboarding cohorts getting our feet into our bindings, a ski patrol passed us and made some comment about snowboarders always on their butts. The year was 1994 and I was fifteen. I just stood up with my group, pointed my board downhill and went without a thought.

Now, getting bindings secured is a struggle, and going from butt-in-snow to standing up doesn’t necessarily happen. Time had continued marching on and left my core strength and flexibly behind.

As we geared up, I showed off my old lift tickets to the people helping us in the rental shop, who looked like they’d been in diapers when my last ticket was issued. “Vintage,” as the girl described it, doing a good job of pretending to be interested.

I’m sure it was odd to the kids in the rental shop—to most people—this middle-aged woman drawing attention to a huge gap in which she was unaware of the passing of time. Time blindness is nothing to be proud of. But with a seventeen-year gap, it would be easy to play it off as the inevitable aging process, like I meant to stop. I’m showing off vintage lift tickets, announcing the passing of years, because I’m getting back into step with the steady march of time.

I mean, maybe. That first day was a test run to see if we could do it again without hurting ourselves. We’re not getting back to where we left off. There’s no going back to 2007. We’re picking back up with older, creakier bodies, bodies that need Advil at the end of the day.

The test-run was a sore-muscled success. We dug our old snowboards out of storage and took them up to the mountain the next weekend. They’re from the mid-’90s, but that was only, like, ten years ago.