Last year, I wasn’t sure if I had the balance and strength to ski, so I decided to request a lesson with Ignite, the adaptive ski program at my local resort, Eldora. Volunteers ski with people who are blind, have lost limbs, or for other reasons can’t ski independently. Because I have vertigo and am deaf in one ear, they said I qualified.My first lesson was at a slow time, early in the season, so they had three volunteers to ski with me. They helped put on my boots, carried my skis to the lift, and as we started down a beginner slope, one skied in front, one to the side and one in back of me to prevent other skiers from crashing into me. I was tentative at first, but after a couple runs, I was skiing with joy—on steeper runs.

I grew up in Los Angeles and am not sure why, but from a young age, I yearned to ski. No one in my family, no one I knew went skiing, but I read books about it, watched movies, and was certain I would love it. At 19, after my sophmore year at Berkeley, I went to Milan on a student-work exchange. In those days, it was safe and common for students to hitchhike around Europe. So when the first snow fell in the nearby mountains, a friend and I hitchhiked from Milano to Cervinia, a ski town on the Italian side of the Matterhorn.

I rented gear and took a lesson—the first of many—from a white-haired, round-bodied Italian man named Pio. He would ski in front of me shouting, “Spigolo, spigolo, signorina.” I had no idea what “spigolo” meant, until years later when I learned it meant “edge”—edge your skis into the snow.  Edging the skis would prevent you from sliding out of control, but most of the Italians on the slope didn’t care about that. They skied the way they drove. Boys would stand at the top of a mountain slope and yell, “Pista!”  Path!  Then they’d barrel down the slope not turning or stopping till they collided with something or someone at the bottom.

Back at Berkeley, friends and I would drive to Squaw Valley on the weekends in winter, where I continued to improve until I could ski the more advanced runs. It helped that I was dating a young man from Norway who’d learned to ski before he could walk.

Wherever I lived after that—New York, Boston, or L.A.—I had friends with whom I’d go skiing. When I had children, from the time they were five, I took them skiing on the weekends at a small resort in Big Bear, and for Christmas vacation we always flew to the ski resort at Alta, Utah.

After my kids went off to college, I left L.A. and accepted a job as a visiting professor at the University of Colorado School of Journalism in Boulder, a decision influenced largely by the fact that, the days I wasn’t teaching, I could ski in the mornings and write in the afternoons. I joined the masters’ ski race program at Eldora. (Masters meant older folks, not experts) Two or three times a week in winter, I would do what I’d dreamed of: ski in the morning and write in the afternoon.

I did not want to compete in races but I loved the training. I quickly discovered that everything I knew and all the gear I owned were wrong. I was wearing a teal one-piece Jean-Claude Killy suit I’d bought on sale in Aspen, but the team members— 10 men and one woman who ranged from 38 to 80 — called it “a green body bag.” They wore skin-tight racing suits with loud spider-web patterns, just as Olympic racers do—except the masters tend to have masters’ bodies. They told me my boots were inadequate and my skis were hopeless. One of the women, Marcy, who a few months later would fall on the snow and break her pelvis, offered to give me her old helmet.

There was no problem keeping up with the team when we skied down the mountain, but when we entered the slalom course, I started skidding and slowing. For years I’d been trying to stand up tall and be graceful, but the racers assumed an aggressive crouch, pushing hard to get their skis on edge and their bodies forward. We watched a video of Bode Miller, and his skis were almost vertical, cutting like knives across the snow. I had no idea how to do that.

Marcy and her husband, Bob, were the only racers who talked to me during the first weeks. Most of the men had competed when they were in college and treated me like a tag-along they wanted to ditch. But I loved the training: it was a blessed relief from thinking. For three hours, all I focused on was: weight on left, weight on right, here’s the next turn and get forward, forward! I didn’t feel I was making much progress, because I was always the slowest skier. But at the end of the season, my coaches told me I was ready for a race. I ended up winning a gold medal for the team because I was the only woman competing in my age group: 55-65.

The next winter, I took my two kids who were visiting from California and a couple of their friends to Vail. I’d taught my son to ski when he was 5, holding him in front of me as we coasted down the bunny slope. By 12 he didn’t want to ski with me anymore. He’d stand at the bottom of the lift looking frustrated. “What took you so long?!”

At Vail, he strapped on a snowboard, and on the first run I beat him down to the chairlift. Because I’d been the worst on my team and could never close the gap, I’d assumed I was not improving much.

“Have you noticed anything different about my skiing?” I asked.

He nodded and said under his breath, “Remarkable.”

That night, my son announced he was going to ski the next day because skis are faster than boards, implying there was no way in hell I would beat him.

The next morning, my son and I, both on skis, started at one end of the resort and worked our way up and down three mountains to the other end of Vail without stopping except to have lunch. I did not beat him, but he had to work hard to stay in front. When he drove our group home that night, he was still pumped, cheeks flushed. “I hate to admit it,” he told the other kids, “but I really enjoyed skiing with Mom.”

Twenty years have passed, and now I’m a grandma. Andrew, his wife and two girls, 5 and 7, live nearby in Colorado and all love skiing. They invite me to join them for a few days at Steamboat Springs. I only ski for a couple hours in the morning, with two helpers from the adaptive ski program. After the second day, I have bruises on my shin from the ski boots and black and blue marks on my side from the one time I fell. But it’s exhilarating to see them all skiing—the little girls in front, then their mom and then dad with a camera, filming us all.

I tell myself, enjoy, this may be your last year to ski. But I remember saying the same thing last year! And I notice that the bruises are healing fairly quickly and I find myself thinking, well, maybe one more season. Maybe I can still ski.