Their chat had been called We Should Do Something since August. By January, Priya had renamed it We Are Actually Doing Something and sent a packing list with a remarkable number of socks on it.
Mateo had skied twice and described both occasions as “basically fine.” Alex, who is nonbinary and had never skied, booked a lesson rather than accepting a highly confident group tutorial. Priya, an Indian American nurse on a precious weekend off, chose the pine loops of the Cadillac Pathway and a slower morning.
They met again without needing matching stories. Alex had learned how to stop. Mateo had learned that he was not qualified to teach stopping. Priya had found enough quiet to remember what her own thoughts sounded like.
At the cabin, dinner took longer than anyone expected. Someone floated Clam Lake Beer Co. in Cadillac. They ate it anyway. Someone put on music, then the kettle for Nobody’s Going Out tea. Alex claimed the good chair and proposed changing the chat name one more time: Same Time Next Winter.
Illustrations are imaginative, not documentary portraits.
Meet the rest of winter’s people →