For twenty years, the house didn’t have a single set of curtains or blinds. As a child in the dark of my bedroom, I would sit close to the window watching the groomers traverse the hill, a spreading yellow light on the mountain. On moonless nights when they weren’t making snow, the night-skiing lights on the slopes were turned off after last call at 10:30, and the old Tucker Sno-Cats would cast the only light in the valley. My breath fogging the glass, I waited for the groomers to finish and turn off their headlights, pitching me into darkness.
It never happened like that, of course. I was always asleep long before the mountain was groomed. The next morning, I would awake, my comforter twisted and half falling off the bed, a circle of condensation on the window where my breath had been.