Why Not

Saturday I hiked Mt. Werner, the ski mountain here in Steamboat, with a friend who'd had her knee replaced a few months ago. Seventeen hundred vertical feet up, and we talked the entire way: travel, her favorite trips, the kind of easy conversation that makes ninety minutes disappear. I kept catching myself mid-sentence just feeling it: the actual gratitude for being able to hike up this kind of terrain, the friendship I have with this person, the abundance of wildflowers. This is my backyard. I still remember what it felt like the first year I lived here, when this view was new enough to stop me on the sidewalk. Saturday it stopped me again, which felt like its own small gift, that it hasn’t gone flat with familiarity.

I came home and lay in bed for three hours. Fully depleted, no apology for it.

Sunday I went up with a different friend, gondola this time, for yoga on the mountaintop. I lay down on the grass in front of the lodge, face up, and from where I was lying I could see a trail I’ve hated for years. Beginner run, always crowded, the one I avoid in winter because I’m convinced some kid learning to turn is going to take me out. I know this view from the yoga studio; usually I finish my practice looking up at the mountain, and I see it. This time I was flat on my back, and it was a hundred feet in front of me. This time, I actually read the sign.

Why Not.

That’s the name of the trail. I’ve skied and hiked past that sign a hundred times and never once let it land. Lying there on the grass, it landed.

Because that’s the question I’ve quietly been asking myself for months now, without naming it. Why not do the dating workshop, after three years of not touching that lane. Why not throw the birthday extravaganza instead of the smaller version I’d have defaulted to a year ago. Why not book six weeks back in Sagres in 2027 instead of talking myself into something shorter and more reasonable. Why not relax. Why not try. Why not apologize first, even when I could argue I don’t have to. Why not lie in bed for three hours after a hike instead of pushing through the rest of the day to prove something to nobody.

The sun stayed behind the clouds that day, and everything was so lush from the rain we’ve had, that particular green that only shows up for a few weeks a year here. I kept thinking, in five months this will be snow, a completely different mountain, a completely different kind of life on top of it, and I love that it changes, that I get to be grateful for both versions instead of grieving one to get the other.

Sunday ended with lunch on the deck with my friend. Nothing more dramatic than that. Yoga, then lunch outside, in a place people fly here to visit for a week and call the trip of a lifetime. It’s just Saturday for me. I try not to let that stop meaning anything.

I don’t have a neat close for this one. Just the sign. Why Not. I’m going to keep asking myself that question on purpose for a while and see what it changes.