Possessions

My friend Jenny posed the following question on our Frederick listserve the other day: Which of your possessions truly bring you joy? It was a hypothetical question, meant to inspire discussion, but suddenly that question has become very important to me.

The City of Boulder has issued a warning that residents in my neighborhood should "prepare for possible evacuations." This afternoon, I contacted my friend Jen, who lives in Castle Rock, so we would have a place to stay should we need to flee; dug up all of our birth certificates and passports; moved the propane tanks to the east side of the yard; pulled out the cat carrier and placed it by the door; packed an overnight bag for me and the girls; and then filled the trunk of the minivan with photo albums and kicked myself for not taking Mike up on the offer to scan all of my old photos.

I'd like to say I looked around and found that I really don't need anything else and, truthfully, as long as we are all safe, that is true. But a friend told me she feels that it's "scary to pack up all of your memories in a few bags." And that's what it is about stuff. It's not the actual things that I'm attached to, but the memories that go along with most of them. There's the guitar that I bought for Toby and the look on his face when I surprised him at Christmas. He usually doesn't like getting gifts but that one brought him so much joy. There's the painting that mom made of our porch at the house in Vermont. I'll never go to that house again and I love the memories that are attached to that view. There's the piano, my great-grandmother's, and all of my books, the watercolors my grandmother collected on a round-the-world tour, the girls' artwork, the pink skirt that all three of them loved when they were two, and the dining room table that my grandfather made. The list goes on and on.

Ultimately, I think our neighborhood will be safe. We may have to evacuate if the winds continue to blow in our direction, but the fire would have to burn through three city blocks to get to our house. However, even having to contemplate this issue has brought me nearly to tears. My heart goes out to everyone who has lost their home, whether in the Four Mile Canyon Fire or in any other disaster. And a huge THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to all of the fire fighters up there right now.

Wanted: A Boring Week in Boulder

The mountains behind us are burning. Over 7,000 acres of forest are gone already. From our yard this morning, the sky was a soot-gray and white ashes kept falling like snow onto our lawn and our hair.

We've experienced mountains burning before. In Studio City two years ago, wildfires ravaged the Angeles National Forest and the Santa Monica Mountains. We breathed in the smoky air and listened to sad news reports of people losing their homes. But we watched the fires from across the valley or on our drives to the ocean and never felt threatened in our home. We didn't personally know anyone who was impacted by the fires, unless you count suffering from slight coughs and watery eyes.

In Boulder, we know several families who have been evacuated from their homes. One family, returning from a camping trip over the weekend, wasn't even able to go back into their home to retrieve family photographs and other important possessions. We have a friend who is fighting the fires. We also know those mountains well--picnics on Bald mountain, BBQs at our friends' homes, hikes and camping trips in the woods. The damage and the danger feels closer this time.

We had a different kind of danger in our neighborhood last week. A mother bear and cub clung to a tree one block from our home while the Department of Wildlife aimed their guns to shoot traquilizers at them. They managed to sedate the mother and, upon realizing that her tongue and bottom jaw had recently been destroyed in an accident or fight, decided to euthanize her. Unfortunately, they killed the mother before they caught the cub, who escaped when they tried to tranquilize him. Noni and I watched from the basement windows as three DOW employees ran across our yard, one of them carrying a huge black gun, searching for the cub. He is still missing. I doubt there's anyone in our neighborhood whose heart didn't break just a little bit last week thinking of the starving and distraught orphaned cub. Now, unfortunately, he is probably in good company as the wildfire takes its toll.

I have this thought that the city of Boulder is due for a really boring week next week. One of those run-of-the-mill weeks where nothing out of the ordinary happens. Where you walk the kids to school and smile at the blue sky and breathe in the clean air without thinking about bears or fires or destruction.

As I write, the wind has shifted and the sky immediately above us is blue again (well, bluish at least). I can hear the sound of tankers overhead and am hopeful that they can stop the fire before more damage is done. My prayers are with my friends and the firefighters in the mountains. Please join me in sending some positive thoughts their way.

Home

Where we love is home, Home that our feet
may leave, but not our hearts.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Homesick in Heaven

Today, a friend asked me how life is in Boulder. I told her that aside from a little bit of vertigo and the stress of a start-up, things are great. We love the skiing, the hiking, the girls' school, our neighborhood, the people we've met so far, the people we've reconnected with by moving here...the list could go on and on. Then she said, "It must be starting to feel like home." Home to me these days is wherever Toby, Evie, Lucy and Noni are, but I don't think we've lived in Boulder long enough for it to truly qualify as our "home". It takes a while to settle in to a place and to me "home" implies that your roots run deep in the ground. By that definition, home to me is still one of two places - either a wooden house at the end of a point in Shelburne, Vermont or a brick house on a tree-lined street in Frederick, Maryland.

I've been thinking of Frederick a lot this week. Maybe it's because the Christmas cards started rolling in and so I am glancing at everyone's smiling faces everytime I walk in or out of the front door; maybe it's the thoughtfulness of the package that arrived for Noni today from a friend; or maybe it's looking through old photographs to find a picture of Adam, since Evie was writing a report on him and his job at the African Wildlife Foundation, and reliving so many memories as I flipped through the photo album. It's probably all three mixed together with the lights that are going up around town, reminding me of downtown Frederick this time of year, the Kris Kringle parade (even though those memories generally consist of trying to prevent freezing ballerinas dressed as snowflakes in cotton sweatshirts try to avoid frostbite), and all of the holiday parties with friends.

We won't be going back east for Christmas this year. The next time we plan to visit Frederick is next summer. I'm so excited for my family to come visit and am frankly happy not to be packing bags of presents and loading all the girls onto a plane or in a car, but I do miss our friends.

At school, Lucy made a paper kite with a string tail. She was supposed to write on it where the kite would like to go. Hers reads, "Lucy's kite would go to Maryland" and she drew a picture of our family in our old house on it. If only it were that easy. It would be nice to grab onto the kite and fly back for a day, to enjoy some mulled wine and home-brewed beer with friends, to exchange holiday wishes and hugs, and to walk through Baker Park and then downtown to see the lights.

Finding Nederland

Ever since moving to Boulder, I've been wanting to get deeper into the mountains. We have done several hikes out of our front door and into the foothills, a couple of hikes up around the Flat Irons, and some biking with snowy mountain views, but because of unpacking and other weekend plans, haven't explored further than that. This weekend, with my dad in town, we finally made the twenty minute drive up the road (and I mean seriously up, about 3,000 feet) to Nederland for some hiking and dinner.

Nederland is only a short drive from Boulder but it feels like a different world. When we left Boulder, it was sixty degrees and sunny, but when we pulled into Nederland twenty minutes later we were under a dark snow cloud. Named for "The Netherlands" by a Dutch mining company, Nederland was originally just a mill down for the silver mines of nearby town of Caribou, which is now a ghost town. Unlike Boulder, Nederland still maintains a gritty, old western vibe, although these days that's mixed with a hippy vibe as well, with the small downtown hosting both a crystal and a hemp store. [A side note: Nederland is also home to one of the most bizarre festivals I've ever heard of: The Frozen Dead Guys festival]

Despite the ominous gray cloud, we passed through the town for a hike around Mud lake. The hike was beautiful, though the girls lost interest when the winds and snow picked up. At one point, we looked into the valley and the snow was blowing horizontally across the tree line. We made our way back to the car, cold, but refreshed by the mountain air.

Since it was still a bit early for dinner, we decided to swing by Eldora, Boulder's nearest ski area, for a quick tour. The lodge is more similar to a West Virginia lodge than a lodge at Vail, but the trails are pure Colorado and I love that we have a great ski area that close to our house.

Then we drove back into town and ate dinner at Kathmandu Restaurant, which is basically a taste of Nepal right in the Colorado mountains. Run by a Nepalese family, the food is served (Nepalese style) on stainless steal plates and cups, and we enjoyed garlic naan and saag and other delicious food. The best part was that it felt wonderfully warm inside as we looked out the windows at the mountains and blowing snow.

As we found from our trip to Nederland, the season for hiking in the mountains to our west is coming to a close. If we want to continue to explore over the winter, we'll have to break out the snow shoes and the skis. Just so long as we have a warm restaurant to enjoy at the end of the day, that works for me.

An old bus at the end of the trail

Eldora map

How can you not love a town with a town hall like this?

Full family photo, if you can spot Noni's foot

Where the wild things are

When your town cozies right up to the Rockies and miles and miles of wilderness, you get some wildlife wandering through your neighborhood from time to time. I noticed the deer as soon as we moved in. They were hard to miss, eating grass out in our front yard. They aren't the Bambi-esque deer of back east, but are a bit hardier looking, with sturdier legs and shaggier fur and I found them completely exotic. We continued to see them and then, when I counted eleven of them on the way to the girls' school one day, it occurred to me that they really aren't exotic at all. Given how often we see them, they are pretty much the neighborhood squirrels. I still like passing them by on the way to school (and probably appreciate them more than most since I'm not a gardener) but I no longer stop to stare or take pictures.

We also discovered pretty quickly that another type of animal frequently makes its way down the mountain. We naively left our trash can out the first week of living here and soon found it knocked over, with a giant crap sitting next to it. We looked at the size of the scat and, after ruling out wandering, trash-digging elephants, realized that a bear had been eating our leftover pizza. We now keep the trash can safely in the garage, but I think about the bear every time I go for a trail run and pass by the "Bear Activity In This Area!" sign.

Then of course, there's another animal. One that recently seems to be, like the deer, as common as squirrels. Only it's not really a good comparison unless you imagine big, meat-eating squirrels with sharp claws and fangs. I'm talking about our friendly neighborhood mountain lions. Like the bears, they come into the neighborhoods feeling a little bit hungry. A week ago, a woman a few blocks away watched in horror as a lion attacked, killed and then ran away with her pet cat. On Friday night, just three blocks away from us, a man saw a lion in his garden at midnight and again at 6:30 AM. And then on Saturday night, just two blocks from us, a family couldn't find their cat in their house before going to bed. The next morning, they found his fur and blood on the sidewalk in front of their house.

I feel terrible about our neighbors losing their cats, but I have to admit that part of me loves that we have bears and mountain lions wandering by our house at night. They should stay in the mountains of course. It's safer for us and for them, as repeat offenders end up shot. But I think it's just that I love the reminder that humans haven't taken over everything, that beautiful wild animals still exist. I often think of Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, where the main character, a park ranger, describes a wild coyote as the "beating heart" of the forest. The mountain lions seem to me to be the beating heart of the mountains behind us.

Don't worry, just because I like the mountain lions doesn't mean I'm not taking precautions. We keep Mouse in at night, the girls aren't allowed to play outside without adult supervision anytime near dusk, and, while I'd like to see a mountain lion, I hope that it would be from my car or living room window. Also, I have to admit feeling a little bit concerned about Halloween. It's probably not rational, but I'm not sure that I should let Noni be a cat. Halloween is for scary costumes anyway. If she really wants to scare people walking down the street, I'm thinking maybe she should dress up as a mountain lion.

To Boulder: XOXOXOX

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog entry about my relationship with Los Angeles. It was basically a letter, or as I called it a "talk", about the way I felt about living there. It wasn't that I didn't like Los Angeles (and, as I mentioned, there were many good things and wonderful relationships that came out of our year there), it's just that it didn't always feel like a good fit. It occurred to me this weekend, as I was running up the goat trail behind our house, that if I were to write a letter to Boulder, it would probably be soaked in perfume, covered in lipstick kisses, and maybe even accompanied by a mix tape (an ipod songlist? How do highschoolers show their affection these days?) full of songs like "Rocky Mountain High". It would be totally cheesy and over the top, but what can I say? I'm in love.

I'm a sucker for love at first sight, so I was probably smitten from day one, when two fuzzy spotted fawns strolled across our backyard and the girls literally jumped up and down with excitement. But since then, it's continued to offer up some pretty nice surprises. For starters, it doesn't feel like we're new here because we already have friends from our past - some that we loved and knew well already and some that we have gotten to know much better since moving to Boulder - who have been incredibly welcoming. I feel like we've jumped right into a community, without having to work much to make it happen. I also love that the community as a whole is so progressive. For example, we walk to school everyday with our Freiker tags on the girls' backpacks, and are passed by biker after biker with "carbon-free ride" stickers on their bike strollers. We've been pretty busy unpacking on weekends, but the few bike rides and hikes we've done already have been incredible and I look at the mountains every morning thinking of all the exploring we have ahead of us.

I could go on, but you probably get the picture. We picked Boulder in part because it did seem like a good fit, so it probably shouldn't surprise me that since I've moved here, I've felt like someone handed me one of those red Staples "That was easy!" buttons. We truly miss our friends and family in other places, but already Boulder is feeling comfortably like home.

All that said, starting a new business is a risky thing to do. There's no guarantee we'll be in Boulder six months, a year from now. Fortunately, my yoga instructor is also a teacher at Naropa University - who knew Boulder had such a large Buddhist population? - so I get weekly reminders to live in the moment and appreciate the now. And I'm happy to report, the now is feeling really good.