I reach for the hidden key, which is exactly where I left it. I give the key just the right amount of jiggle to open up the lock. It’s been months since I was last here and yet, once I’m inside, I feel like I never left. The coat I left slung over the couch is still lying there as if I just got back from skiing and threw it off. The shelf next to the couch is stacked full of books, toys, games, and other relics from my childhood. I can remember being right here when I was much younger playing with these toys. Years since then have passed, but I’m still standing right here. Nothing has changed except for me. The toys are still sitting exactly where they were, the feeling of the carpet scratching my body is the same but the desire to sit down and play is gone. Though many things in my life are different, the mountain view out the window still strikes me with the same feeling that it did when I first saw it. My bed upstairs, which no one has slept in for months, still has the signs of a human body having tossed and turned in their sleep. This entire condo has the impression of my past self imprinted on it, and yet here I stand another year gone by and an entirely different person. 

Just two years ago I was living in Italy. I remember catching my bus to school on a rainy, cold day in December. The streets of Florence are narrow and crowded with tourists even in December. The bus was always packed with people going to work. It was also confusing to figure out exactly how to manage the bus system. I would ride the 15 minutes to my school, thinking all the while about how much more difficult this was compared to back home. The heated car ride from my house to school would take eight minutes at most. Now I was riding with a bunch of strangers, and I don’t even have a place to sit. There are two things you learn pretty quickly when living in Italy; there are a lot of rules, and no one follows them. Eventually, this became normal to me. It began to feel so comfortable, I would even go sometimes without my bus pass. Until one day after school, my friends and I were riding back all without our passes, and our hearts sank as the ticketing officer stepped on board. A few minutes later I had a ticket I had to pay for fifty euros. The last bus I took before they closed the school, and we had to fly home, was almost entirely empty. Sometimes there wasn’t even enough space on the bus for me, but now I was one of three people riding on it. I was back home forty-eight hours later. 

It’s interesting how you can mark the changes in how you grow up by what you notice. I only started to notice there weren't any shades on the windows in my room the past couple of years. Every morning light floods into my room reflecting off the snow, but when I was younger I was always up anyway. As I grew older, this light became increasingly more annoying every year. It’s like the desire to sleep more directly correlates to getting older. The light does make the morning process a little easier, forcing me out of bed. Downstairs, I drink some bitter coffee out of a cup which for years was filled exclusively with hot chocolate. I used to hate the taste of coffee, and now I drink it every single morning. One thing that’s never changed is that no matter how you plan it, getting on the mountain in the morning always takes longer than you’d expect. It can be a long process, suiting up in all of the snow gear. It might have more to do with leaving the warm house and entering the cold snow. When I was younger it would’ve been much more difficult to motivate me out of the condo. When I was younger, my feelings toward snowboarding were leaning more towards dispassionate. It was more of a thing to do than anything else. It was just something to fill my weekends. 

After having lived in Italy for over half a year, I had been away from Sugarloaf for the longest stretch since when we first started going ten years ago. Covid was rampant throughout the community, and online learning was in full effect. Once winter came the boredom had set in. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go. That was until I realized that I could do online learning from the condo. Over the course of that winter, I spent more time up at Sugarloaf than ever before. It helped me develop a passion for snowboarding that had been lacking my whole life. Whatever free time I had, I was rushing up the mountain as fast as I could to get a couple of runs in before class. I would rather have been in class with my friends, but being here made this difficult time special in its own way. Earlier in my life, I might not have even been that excited. For much of my younger life being at Sugarloaf was my parent's time, but these circumstances absolutely changed the way I viewed this time. The boredom that I was stuck in forced me to be more adventurous, and more willing to try things. 

Change is inevitable. This is something that becomes more and more apparent the more you experience it. When I was ten years old, part of me probably thought I was going to be ten forever. Now at 17, I can feel myself each month marching closer to adulthood. I'm glad that I can remember and hold onto certain parts of my childhood and that certain parts of my past self are still apparent in my character, like my playfulness. I’m also glad that I’ve been able to mature and grow and change since I was ten years old. It’s important to me that I’m able to hold onto my past with physical places like Sugarloaf. It’s a place where I can measure time. I can look back and see myself at different stages in my life. I have all these memories and feelings from my childhood rooted here in Sugarloaf. For example, the first time I became aware of my stutter I was standing in the living room talking to my grandmother. When I’m there I’m flooded with nostalgia. Each time I re-enter those doors, I’ve changed an incredible amount, and yet everything within the walls around me has stood frozen in time.

I reach into the closet to get my snowboard out. My bare skin on the metal doorknob burns from the cold. The board is caught beneath a pile of old skis, but after moving some out of the way it slips out. The sleds in the cubby to the left of the door catch my eye. They make me think of all the days I spent playing in the snow into the night. I can’t remember the last time I went sledding. 

There are only a few times in one's life when one knows they are standing at the threshold of immense change. Standing here on the front steps, I know in a few months I’m about to leave behind my childhood. At first, I feel scared thinking about how I had to figure out who I’m going to be, and then I feel excited by the idea of growing up and entering the unknown. 

Covid has wiped out a lot of memories, blending things together, but this place has cemented specific memories. I hope I’ll never forget taking the SAT course, watching movies on the projector, and taking hot tubs with my friends. Wherever I end up, I know that I’ll always have these memories and feelings about this place. I may not always have this condo to come back to, but I’ll always have this connection to this place, this mountain, and this state. No matter what happens, I can always come back and reconnect with my childhood here. These are my roots, this is my home.