When I was a little kid, my mom would put me into ski school as a form of daycare so she could go skiing. I don’t blame her. I was her third child and she’d paid her dues with my older siblings as a parent teaching tiny-and-whiny children to slide down snow. By the time I rolled around, she was ready to outsource that duty to someone else.

I have both foggy and distinct memories of the many weekends that I spent in a musty basement room of the lodge at California’s Alpine Meadows Snow School in the mid-80s. I consumed a lot of popcorn and hot chocolate, took naps on the floor, and skied a little. Once, my mom tasked my brother, six years older than me, to pick me up from ski school, but he forgot. I was the last kid standing. This being long before the days of cell phones, to track down my mom (who was presumably out skiing powder) they had to announce my name over the lodge loudspeaker: “Whoever is in charge of picking up Megan Michelson at Snow School, please come downstairs.”

None of this bothered me much. I loved my days at snowy daycare: the repetition, playing in the snow with friends, the freedom. As a family, we would spend nearly every winter weekend in the Lake Tahoe area, then drive five hours on Sunday nights back home to Half Moon Bay, where I lived for the first five years of my life. This was back when my parents were still together, before things got messy and divorce split us in half, with my brother living with my dad, and my sister and I moving hours away, closer to the mountains, with my mom. Our ski weekends in Tahoe back then seemed like our happy place—or, at least, that was my take on all of it.

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