By Merisa Sherman With big eyes, she looked out at the carpet with trepidation. You could see her tiny little mitten wrap around her father’s leg as she made sure her support system was intact. She stood, barely holding herself up, as her dad bent down to help her kick the soccer ball and then…

By Merisa Sherman With each snowflake, with each storm, comes the chance to begin again, to start anew. No storm will be the same as the one before nor will any storm be the same as ones to come. Just as no snowflake is the same, neither is any snowstorm. With each unique storm comes…

By Merisa Sherman “Vermont must be beautiful this time of year …all that snow.” What a great way to trick your best friend into heading up to Vermont for the holidays! The phrase gets repeated over and over again throughout the movie, as Danny Kaye successfully manipulates Bing Crosby into changing their plans from New…

By Merisa Sherman A young man was banging on doors, a large blue cardboard poster under his arm. In the center was a large black and white photo of a random mountain in Vermont. It was taken from an off angle, and you could see the wing of the plane in the corner of the…

By Merisa Sherman It’s crunchy season. A gorgeous afternoon, with the shining sun strong in the sky, but the ground beneath is the loudest it will be all year. A few inches of beautiful snow had melted back to reveal snowy patches alternating with leaves frozen on the ground. It was like a chorus of…

By Merisa Sherman It was dark when I got out of work. The recently fallen snow was glittering in the golden lamplight. We had gotten so much snow that the birch trees above my car were bending under the weight. I shuffled my boots under the snow, the fluffy white snow poofing upward with every…

By Merisa Sherman Like so many East Coasters, I grew up ski racing. It was an excuse to ski. The better I got, the more days we could pack onto the weekend. Commitment meant we would practice drills at my home mountain after school midweek. We couldn’t get enough. I raced from childhood through college,…

By Merisa Sherman The cocktail party twirls on around me as I gather up abandoned glasses throughout the Great Room. I duck under one person’s elbow, my right arm hopefully protecting the glasses on my cocktail tray from getting bumped. I feel like a panther, stealthily avoiding our lovely guests who are caught up in…

By Merisa Sherman A big cheer went up from the group as we made our way through the scanners. Our passes worked — well, mostly and our motley crew of individuals placed our equipment in the racks of the gondola. Two skiers and three snowboarders, friends for the longest of times. We hadn’t planned this…

By Merisa Sherman I am sitting, cross-legged, on top of one of the oldest pieces of exposed rock in the world. The wind is swirling around me, almost like it’s about to lift me in a twirl off of the rock and into the sky. But the rock is grounding me, I can feel the…

By Merisa Sherman The sun was shining, the snowmakers were hard at work on their pre-season task of covering Rime with a blanket of white … and I was meeting one of my original ski sisters for a quick walk in the woods. Wait, did I just write that they were finally making snow? Oh,…

Looking through the gear, wondering and waiting By Merisa Sherman It’s the most wonderful time of the year … and for the ski bum it can be the most stressful. Every night as I go to bed — then again when I wake up — the first thing I do is check the weather. I…

By Merisa Sherman My sister and I would wake up all groggy and stiff, not having made the trip for a few months. It would be dark when we got out of the car and we would grab our backpacks, trudge sluggishly through the courtyard and up the stairs to our condo. Opening the door,…

By Merisa Sherman With great care, the BF lowered our favorite canoe into the water. With the new influx of cold weather, the water was perfectly see-through and you could see the sun shining on the rocks below the surface. The light even shone through the canoe, highlighting the handmade seams and creating even more…

By Merisa Sherman I turned around and looked back behind me. The Green Mountains lay sprawled below, the once-green now beginning to turn myriad colors. Yes, the thin reds are beginning to pop and are doing so in a wide vibrant form. You cannot help but notice them, randomly sprinkled about the mountains below. Last…