You land of red dirt you, I've taken you for granted for quite a while now. I appreciate how you've continued to love me even when I wasn't too sure how I felt about you (but deep down inside I knew I loved you all along.)
My relationship with the Rocky Mountain State began at the ripe ole' age of six when my Dad, his girlfriend, Mary (she's my stepmom now) and Mary's little sister, Jane and her boyfriend moved out from Michiana. (Michigan/Indiana line area.) Dad and Mary drove the U-Haul van stocked full of Mary's antique furniture and houseplants that we nurtured all along the way. I got to ride in the cool car with Jane, listening to Tracy Chapman and The Cure with the windows down and Kansas prairie outside. I remember this because on the radio came a tornado warning out of the blue. They spotted the funnel cloud, so we had to get out of the car and lay in a ditch. I still remember how dry and scratchy the grass was there next to the highway in Kansas. Eventually, the radio came on saying the coast was clear and so we started the car back up and got back on the highway. We started in Kalamazoo, Michigan and landed in Boulder, Colorado. I was a Michiana gal up until that point. All my eyes had ever seen for peaks up until that point were cornfields.
I'd come out every summer, spring and winter break. The first day out of school I flew out, and didn't return until sometimes the day before. I'd go to YMCA summer camp and take field trips all around, and most weekends with Dad and Mary we were on our own kind of field trips too- hiking, camping and baseball games in the summer and lots of skiing in the winter and spring. One summer afternoon my Dad told me that he and Mary had bought a lakeside resort with ten cabins on it next to the lake that he grew up on, and just minutes from Mary's hometown, and that we would start going there in the summer. I remember looking out the window at the dry summer ground, cracked around a sage bush. Colorado is what I knew and so I was sad. I said goodbye anyway, of course. My Michigan lake summers are some of my fondest childhood memories, as it turns out. I kind of forgot about Colorado, to be honest.
Dad and Mary moved back to Boulder when I in college, so I started visiting here again. I had no intention on living in Colorado at any point. I wasn't resistant to the idea at all, it had just never occurred to me. I was so used to visiting for a short time, and then heading back 'home' to the other side of the Mississippi, I had never considered living elsewhere.
I came to live with them when I got back from Japan and England. I met AMC three weeks later. Three months after that, we started dating and we decided to move to Denver. We'd only been dating for a few months but you know what they say, 'it just happened.' It's true though, my heart led the way and it just seemed to happen. But, my head sometimes at the very beginning, tried to get in the way, like it sometimes tries to do, with all it's might. Sometimes, what I call the old tape in my head would rear it's ugly head and say, "What if this guy is really a weirdo, you should probably travel to another country again, you might want to leave this Denver place now." And then, I realized, this AMC guy is really the cat's meow, and so, with a firm imaginary chuck, I threw the old tape out and just let the new one roll.
Anyway, the point is.... there are lots of days when I take Colorado way for granted, but there are others, like today, when I ride my bike on the path next to the river along with the other bikers, skaters and movers, to the garden where we're getting married. It's my new routine, I visit most every day. The park isn't open for the season yet, so I just walk around it (or jump the fence if I need to do some wedding planning, shh.) Each day, I notice something new... where the doves burrow in the low bushes yesterday, and today- two bird nests way up in the "orchard area." Yellow and purple flowers have begun to sprout up, each day a little fuller.
Since it's so warm and sunny these days, I never feel like going right home again so I take the long way... just around the corner to Confluence Park. There is a grassy slope there that is the perfect everything: slope angle, view of the downtown skyline, river and lots of sky. It's moments like that one there, with the spring sun tanning my winter skin, that it seems I've been here all along.
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| hats! denver street photography |
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| Confluence Park is the meeting point for Cherry Creek and Confluence River. |
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| lunch on the grassy slope, come on sunkist, no real orange juice, at all? weak. but so good. |
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| our wedding garden, pre season. |
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| blossom's to be at the gardens....blossom fiance's then? |
