Boston Mills is selling off its double chair, through an auction that raises money for the Boys and Girls Club of Northeast Ohio.

BOSTON TOWNSHIP, Ohio – At Boston Mills, there’s no need name the chair lifts. This was always just “the double,” the two-person lift just over the bridge that served black-diamond North Bowl and intermediate blue Peter’s Pride.

And as a kid on ski club Saturdays, you couldn’t take the lift until an instructor had awarded you a dark blue sticker, which you wore proudly on the pass elastic-looped around your neck. Then you’d slide on your rentals into that long fishhook of a line, side-by-side your best ski buddy. You wore your hair in high ponytails spilling over your ski headbands and jeans if you were lucky and your mom had let you ditch the snowpants And you passed the wait gossiping about everyone else in ski club.

Now that chairlift is being replaced by a brand-new, speedy quad.

Boston Mills owner Vail Resorts is auctioning off the chairs, to benefit the Boys and Girls Club of Northeast Ohio and Vail’s Epic Promise Employee Foundation. Sister resort Brandywine is also auctioning off a quad chair.

You can buy signs from each chairlift, plus 10 double chairs (each 150 pounds and measuring 99.75 by 45 by 17 inches) and 20 quad chairs (350 pounds, 8 feet by 87.5 by 30 inches).

Bidding starts Friday at noon, with a $250 minimum for the doubles, $100 for the quads and $25 for the signs. The auction closes Saturday. Payments tax-deductible, minus the starting bids. Register here.

“This is like owning a piece of history,” says Vail.

I’ve had the auction date marked on my calendar for weeks, hoping to buy a chair that I’ll somehow MacGyver to hang in my backyard.

The chair – which Vail calls No. 5 -- wasn’t the easiest. It always had a line. You had to crane your neck to see it whip around the bend, then hope it didn’t rock too violently as you went to sit down. I’ve landed on strangers’ laps. I’ve also tightly gripped my children’s snowpants as they sat. But from that chair, you could see every hill. Every neon ski jacket and snowboard trick.

Thirty-five years have passed since I learned to ski at Boston Mills.

I went to college, got jobs and moved to other states. I skied Vail and Beavercreek, Park City and Winter Park on ski vacations. But Boston Mills will always be my weekend winter home.

My mom is a ski instructor. My kids have earned their freedom there, to ride the double chair with their friends and cousins.

It always took some finagling, to decide which two would ride together. No more, now that Boston Mills is getting its first quad chair.

Fingers crossed, I can own a piece of the old one.

My daughter and a friend ride the double together.

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