Mud Season

The last lift ran, and now the valley enters the season it does not advertise. Half the restaurants go dark. The other half cut their hours and mean it. The locals reappear on the streets like the place is theirs again, because for six weeks it is.

Mud season is the off ramp between the two performances, winter and summer, when the town stops being a destination and goes back to being a town. The trails are too wet to hike and the slopes are too bare to ski, and there is, blessedly, nothing to do but live here.

We do our best accounting now, in the gap, before the June crowds arrive and the clock starts again. The record is kept in the quiet. It always was.