My fingers move of their own accord, tightening the straps while I press the lever open. I pull just a little bit more before letting the strap fall and wrapping a backup knot. I let both straps fall into the car and shut the door, hopefully keeping the straps from flapping around and breaking…

  I cannot see much, just the white and yellow lines of the freeway swaying here and there around the mountains. “Coyote,” by Joni Mitchell, is stuck in my head on repeat as I watch those lines, matching the lean of our bike to the rhythm of the road. I ride 2UP (pronounced: two up), which means…

  There’s a cradling, a sense of calm that takes over you as the water moves gently beneath your boat. A soft bounce that you can feel almost immediately as you step foot into your craft and shove off from the shore. You almost don’t need to go anywhere, you can simply float in place…

  I knew the shape of the box. I could feel it, even though it was wrapped in the traditional Christmas paper and technically looked like all of the other boxes underneath the tree. But my sister and I, we just knew what would be in those 3-inch thick boxes. It wasn’t the right shape for…

  Taking a deep breath, I gently lowered my canoe into the water, making sure to accomplish that without making a splash. Trying to keep my feet from getting wet, I rotated back and forth, gathering the items I had placed on the shore and carefully placing them into the canoe. My life jacket hung…

  I might have missed the Flood of 1927, but I was here in 2011 and heard the boulders screaming as they scratched against each other as they flew down the mountain. I heard the Roaring Brook roar with all its might as it catapulted itself down the mountain. I saw the water turn backward under…

  We pulled up our bright white socks, the old school mid-shin kind that in my dad’s day might have had two red or blue stripes at the top. We pulled them up high, over our jeans and then sat down to put our sneakers on. Well, not too high, but just enough that there…

  The red, white and blue ribbons flutter behind the young girl as she skips along the parade route. Her hair glistens in the sunshine and she laughs with joy. She holds a thin stick, not quite a baton, with wrapping paper ribbon attached with a bow, way too much glue and curled with a…

We skied in a wedge, poles wrapped around our waists with the basket ends looped into the straps. You had to suck your stomach in to make it work, and then the poles would settle onto your hips and your hands would be free to do all the work. And so we slipped the ruts…

  “When you are afraid, do the thing you are afraid of and soon you will lose your fear of it,” Norman Vincent Peale (author of The Power of Positive Thinking) famously said. Around in circle my feet go, through the phases of the pedal stroke. I pull the pedal backward and upward, my sticky…

It’s the earliest day of the season (for my family anyway). We were in line an hour before the lifts started, with Bloody Marias and breakfast sandwiches in hand, way earlier than we would get there for any powder day. We won’t even wait on line on opening day, choosing instead to start the season…

  You could hear the screaming from our house as the truck rolled into town. No matter what day it was, kids would come running out of their homes in all directions in a mass frenzy, making their way to the safe spot, a non-verbally agreed to location where our parents felt we would be…

  This weekend, we express our gratitude for our fallen heroes. Each of us will do this in our own way. Some of us will attend parades and lay down wreaths of flowers at the gravesites of our men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice. Others will carry an American flag down Superstar as they feel…

  We shuffle across the top, avoiding the crux of the mound. Instead, we slide around. Looking down at the luscious field below, still we slide around. Not for any particular reason, but perhaps merely to avoid beginning rather than simply diving right in. It’s too awesome to be there, at the start, looking down…

I have always loved watching the first flowers of the year pop out of the ground and slowly, ever so slowly, make their way from infant hood into greenery, budding and then finally into the beauty that they have been concealing. My mom feels the same way about butterflies, but I love perennials. I get…