Yuki

Somewhere between the parking lot and the summit, Maggie comments on how this is the second weekend she’s skied with me, and this is the second weekend that the sky has settled low over the mountains, the clouds breaking up and coming down in torrents of flakes.

I smile and point to the yellow symbol on the crown of my snowboard helmet. I tell her how a kind witch of the north placed it there, as if in celebration of her novel discovery of her icy birthright. She placed it so that it would call to the skies, and she called it a sigil: a guidepost for gods of winter. With it, they would find me, wherever I may go, and they would let their blessings fall around me in cloaks and curtains of powdery white.

“So long as I wear it,” I tell Maggie “where I go, the snow will follow.”

And as if in evidence, the wind whips up, and the clouds settle in closer. They consume what remains of the mountains and fill the space in between with white until the banks of electrical light have to blaze prematurely and the skiers around us pass in and out of view like ghosts.

Mountain Day 11