“They put up their first J-bar between the Twister and the East Meadow runs,” I remember my mother telling me. Over the years, when she spouted ski-area statistics to me, I would learn to tune her out.

All the Brewster girls had gone to summer camp at Aloha Camp on Lake Morey in Fairlee, Vermont, allegedly the oldest girls’ camp in the state. That summer camp was where my mom made friends with skiers from Stowe. My mother flunked out of Bennington as fast as she could; she didn’t stick around Bromley, not for long, not then. With the help of those girl campers from Aloha, she spent her first ski season in Stowe; this went on through the forties and into the fifties, when my mom was helping at the ski area and getting to know Mount Mansfield. My mother would henceforth designate the ski season as her “winter job.” Both before and after I was born, she spent most of her winters in Stowe. I felt like I was a ski orphan.

Until July 1956, when I was fourteen, I lived with my grandmother and the principal emeritus. There was much fussing over me by my busybody aunts. I was an illegitimate child, but I was watched over. With two older cousins, I had no lack of hand-me-down clothes—boys’ clothes, mostly.

Technically speaking, Nora wasn’t a boy. But my cousin Nora was a tomboy; until she was sent off to the school for girls in Northfield, Massachusetts, Nora wore only boys’ clothes. My cousin Henrik was a real boy—a real dickhead, it would turn out. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had married Norwegians from northern New Hampshire; my uncles, Johan and Martin Vinter, were brothers. The Vinter family was in the logging and lumber business. Not Uncle Johan and Uncle Martin—they taught at Exeter, which would make my cousin Henrik a faculty brat when he attended the academy. Given that they were daughters of a former headmaster of Phillips Exeter, Abigail and Martha had come of age while paying attention to the young bachelors on the academy faculty—as my grandmother had observed.

My mom, on the other hand, had come of age while paying attention to skiing—or to skiers. Unsurprisingly, Johan and Martin Vinter were skiers. Why wouldn’t they be? Their name means “Winter” in Norwegian, and they’d grown up in North Conway—where the Cranmore Mountain ski resort began operations in 1937. Johan and Martin hadn’t waited for the first rope tow to be installed. They were telemark skiers on Cranmore before there were any lifts; they put skins on their telemark skis and skinned up Cranmore Mountain before they skied down.