very winter, I click my boots into my ski bindings and feel an immediate sense of orientation — the sharp snap of the plastic locking, the weight settling beneath my feet. It’s the same feeling I get at the top of a lift when the bar rises and the view of the mountain hits my face. It’s a combination of anticipation and peace. I don’t need to warm up to the mountain. I just start moving.

I’ve always skied at Ragged Mountain, a small resort in New Hampshire close enough to my home that a ski day never feels like something I prepare for. It’s the kind of place where you learn the lift attendants’ names, where parents let their kids roam around and play hide and seek, where you ski the same trails enough times that they start to feel conversational. You learn their moods. Which corrugated lines become ice first. Where the wind comes up hardest at the top. Where the snow stays powder after everyone has brushed off the rest.

There’s no dramatic origin story about how I learned to ski, no legendary family tale about a shaky first run that gets brought up at the dinner table. It’s always been a part of me — knowing how to lean forward, read the mountain, and trust the rush without letting it spiral into chaos.

My skis wait all year on the staircase down to the basement, propped up against the wall, twiddling their thumbs until I take them down in November. They’re scratched in places I can trace back to specific days at Ragged Mountain: a dent from that clear-skied afternoon when I pushed too fast down a groomed trail I thought I knew well, or a piece of fiberglass coming off after the cloudy morning when I decided to follow my more-advanced brother.

Every groove holds a memory, even if, in the moment, I didn’t realize it would be one.

One day, halfway down a run I’d skied a hundred times before — ironically named Easy Winder — I caught myself hesitating, then second-guessing, trying to control every inch of the run. I wiped out almost immediately. I got up with snow packed into my gloves and down my jacket. I realized I’d broken the cardinal rule of skiing: don’t freeze on a mountain.

On skis, there’s no room for spiraling. You don’t get to overthink your next move when gravity makes it for you. There’s only balance, pressure, focus, and breath.

Even recently, over winter break, I had a yard-sale-style crash — skis off, poles somewhere uphill, snow in my face. I laid in the packed powder for a second longer than I should have, taking in the sight of the blue sky above me, dizzy and blinking the white ice crystals out of my eyes, before laughing it off, clicking back in, and flying down the mountain.

When I ski, my body speaks first. It knows when to slow down, when to cut across the snow-packed hill, and when to let go. Something about being on the mountain calms me in a way I’m not sure words can describe. It teaches me how to recover after a mistake, how to shake off the white dust, and how to move forward. I’ve trusted that instinct for years, long before I trusted myself anywhere else.

When I’m at college, I miss the mountain. I miss the confident version of myself — the girl that thrives despite the windburn on her face and pain in her joints.

When grades from my first semester at college came out, my phone lit up with messages dissecting the magic numbers we’d all been waiting for: our GPAs. I was flooded with relief, disappointment, and regret.

I had been back home for a few days, already detached from my new life at Harvard. I could pretend I didn’t care, when in reality, I cared a little too much. The messages kept coming, and despite their well-meaning intent, were full of comparisons disguised as reassurance.

That same afternoon, after turning my notifications off, I decided to go skiing. On the mountain, none of my worries followed me. There were no numbers to measure myself against, no rankings to wonder about — just speed, balance, keeping warm, and the relief of only being held accountable to the slope in front of me.

Lately, my life feels like it’s moving faster than the time I skied straight down a black diamond slope. A new place, with new people and new expectations — like dropping onto an unfamiliar trail where my body learns as the mountain goes.

Some days, it feels like I’m halfway down the slope — always committed, always accelerating, and always unsure if I chose the best route down.

But when everything else feels unfamiliar, Ragged Mountain is not. My hill is still there. My skis remain the same. The same old slow chairlift on the right side of the hill. The same weight. The same pull.

It reminds me that even when the terrain changes, the body remembers how to move.

Skiing doesn’t teach me how to stop. It reminds me to move with purpose, to move imperfectly, and to trust that I’ll figure out the rest on my way down.

—Staff writer Tess E. Sumner can be reached at [email protected].