Beltane Closing Moon
Category Archives: Colorado
JFest
Beltane Closing Moon
Kate and I went to Boulder J Fest yesterday. It was on Pearl Street Mall, a three block long pedestrian mall that is the heart of downtown Boulder. We had a great time, wandering among booths that featured Jewish crafts people, Kosher food, humanist Judaism, Judaism Your Way and B’Nai Brith among many others.
We ate lunch in an excellent Italian trattoria with outdoor seating that gave us a comfortable front row seats to the performance tent. We first heard Lost Tribe, a klezmer band with extraordinary range doing everything from Bob Dylan to reggae klezmer. After they finished an acapella Orthodox group Six13 took over the stage.
Here’s a video of one of their number on youtube:
Golden
Beltane Closing Moon
To the Colorado Geology Museum on the Colorado School of Mines’ campus. Introducing Mary to the geological and mining heritage of our new home. Struck up a conversation with the clerk in the gift shop, always a School of Mines’ student. She was a geological engineer and headed for work in a petroleum or mining related job.
“Both are cyclical,” she said, in response to my question, “But both are at the bottom of their cycles right now.” She has no job and her geological engineer spouse does. “But,” she said a tad ruefully (they both graduated last month), “teaching middle school science.” In St. Louis.
I’ve not yet raised the question about environmental effects with any of these students , still feeling my way into the local culture. But, I intend to.
After the Geology Museum we went into downtown Golden. It has this odd theme: Denver stole the title of capital from us and we’ve been working ever since to bring you things worth seeing. Snarky, a self-put down and, to me, unpleasant.
We had some yogurt. Kate and Mary went to the quilt museum which apparently had a wonderful exhibit while I wandered the main street poking my head into shops. None of them really grabbed. The art galleries were full of yesterday’s ideas and tomorrow’s kitsch. The gift shops had the usual assortment of inexpensive gemstones, bottle cap openers with your name on the handle, hats and t-shirts and sweatshirts with Golden somewhere written on them. I did see one piece I liked. A pillow with a hand sewn Colorado flag featured an elk in the lotus position. Sounds cheesy, but the execution was good.
Eventually I sat down in the shade. Just another 68 year old guy waiting for his wife to come to the quilt shop.
Visiting
Beltane Closing Moon
Mary always brings gifts, this time beautiful cloth for Kate from Indonesia and items of anthropological interest for me, including a small book of odd superstitions common in Singapore. In another post I’ll share some of them with you.
Visiting family and friends requires real commitment on her part since it’s about 9100 miles from Singapore to Denver. That’s roughly ten times the Minneapolis/Denver distance. How she endures all that international flying, I don’t know. I find it exhausting and maddening, one in direct relation to the other.
Last night we all three went to the Fort, the restaurant I wrote about before that was built to imitate Bent’s Fort, an 1830’s trading company’s place of business in what is now southern Colorado. They serve what would have been available on the menu at Bent’s Fort: bison, elk, quail, lamb, beef though I notice Shrimp Veracruz and Quinoa, which Mary had last night, have been added.
The Fort is all adobe construction with thick tree trunks as support beams and pillars. It overlooks, from high among the red rocks of the Fountain Formation in Morrison, the twinkling lights of Denver about 20 miles in the distance. The staff dresses somewhat like voyageur’s, appropriate since Bent’s Fort did business with French trappers and traders who worked closely with native peoples here as they did in the far north.
I’m An Old CowHand From the Rio Grand
Beltane Closing Moon
Three things of significance today. Picked up Mary for her first visit to Black Mountain Drive. I’m wired up with leads and a belt holster, ekgs available at the push of a button. This is for thirty days or until I have 3 episodes or events.
And. The Andover house closed, almost all of the money is in our bank account. We are no longer cash poor and paying two mortgages. Yippee, Yi, Ya as we say out here in the West. It hasn’t quite sunk in yet, but we’ve looked up our bank balance and it’s pretty damned healthy. Great to have that uncertainty behind us.
Now the entire circus tent has been struck, all three rings, loaded on the train and the train’s left town, heading west. Our last physical and fiscal ties to Minnesota ended today around 3pm. The friendships, the cultural and political ties, those will remain.
But today we are wholly here from a business perspective. Black Mountain Drive already feels like home, as does the Front Range. How long it takes for our souls to take root in the mountains is an unknown, but a pleasant one, a process of taking the mid out of the midwesterner. It’s already begun. Gotta go now and hitch my hoss to a post.
Monsoon Season
Beltane Closing Moon
Clear, bright mornings with afternoon, early evening rain or thunderstorms.That’s been the pattern the last few days. A photographer I met at the Shadow Mountain Artist’s co-op in Evergreen said May was usually Monsoon season. Seems like a tropical pattern to me, but I like it whatever it is.
Right now the sun lights up a cloudy, blue sky, making the greens of the well watered ponderosas and aspens vibrant. Weather5280 says changing weather in the Pacific, especially a strengthening true El Nino, may keep us cool and wetter through the rest of the year. But, it also says, drought and dry will return, possibly in 2016.
If we stay cooler and wetter this year that should give us an opportunity to get our fire mitigation projects completed with less exposure to wildfire.
Under the Closing Moon (I Hope), Just Me and My Gal
Beltane Closing Moon
Spoke with Kate and our money manager, RJ Devick, yesterday. Made plans for the house proceeds that we will not receive today. (see below) I know real estate deals aren’t over until the money exchanges hands. I know it. But, I let myself believe this week. Shattered faith. Well, no. But disappointed? Yes.
Kate’s headed for a quilt shop in Hot Springs, South Dakota, also site of the adolescent mammoth suicide hole. Hot Springs imbedded itself in my memory on one early visit. I ate lunch at a local cafe and when I got the check, it had a 10% discount on it. When I asked what the 10% was, the clerk, in her teens, said happily, “Oh. That’s the senior discount.”
On Kate’s trip. Got a strange call from Enterprise, the car rental folks yesterday. Mr. Olson? Sort of. Huh, oh, well anyway. We’d like to go over the final bill for Kate Olson. What? Yes she checked in today. No, I don’t think so, since she’s still in Minnesota. What? A lot of confusion, silent but pregnant. After all, he had the numbers right in front of him. Then. I see, do you have a number for her? I did.
Meanwhile I had a day of rest, no medical tests, no interactions with others except the four dogs. Priceless. In much better spirits this morning. Better rested, unprodded and quiet.
There was that matter of the Zatarains though. Kate bought me some crawfish meat and I planned to stir into a Zatarain’s jambalaya mix for supper. I set the Zatarain’s box out on the counter in preparation. Later in the day I looked where it had been. Only empty space. Some dog ate it. Cardboard and dry contents altogether, leaving only the aluminum foil liner that held the rice and seasoning. So, I went to Brookforest Inn and got a pizza.
A Dip Down
Beltane Closing Moon
NB: Yet another down post. Skip it if you like.
Yesterday’s organ was the eye. Glaucoma check-up. Lots of gazing into my eyes. Dr. Repine said, almost as if she were surprised, “Your eyes look good!” She’s very enthusiastic. “And, you have some cataracts, but if they get too big, we’ll just take them out!” I told her my eyes felt good. She seemed to want a response. Back on Latanoprost, from now on, I imagine.
I felt pretty good up to this appointment, though I was beginning to weary of high stakes medical tests, waiting for results. Didn’t realize how weary until, after squinting through my sunglasses all the way home-they dilated my eyes-and getting a headache, I suddenly dropped into a funk.
Here’s how the funk went. Moved to Colorado. All that. Then on April 14th a physical. Since then negative findings, consultations, biopsy, diagnosis, echocardiogram, glaucoma check and more to come. Consultation on the 11th about prostate cancer. Treatment, probably surgery, recovery. Holter monitor installed on Tuesday, wear that for a month. What’s causing my shortness of my breath? Not why me. No, not that. But the constant drip of this negative, that one. Of people probing, poking, peeking inside, evaluating, deciding. And waiting. Waiting. Wondering. I was, too, tired.
This morning I’ve decided I need to stay at home, get some stuff done around here. Go easy. Maybe catch a movie today or tomorrow. Better rested this morning I feel better, too. But I need to let my body and mind and my spirit rejuvenate, refresh. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
Colorado Natives
Beltane Closing Moon
Colorado Native Plants. The books are out and water stained: Colorado Flora, Colorado Noxious Weeds, Native Plants of Mt. Falcon. The also water stained plant list for Mt. Falcon has check marks for the plants I need to know. Went through about half of them yesterday, the other half today.
In studying the very specific nomenclature for plant identification, I got a new appreciation for medical jargon. In writing and communication with other doctors and nurses it is necessary to name the various parts of the anatomy with specificity. Otherwise, the wrong limb gets cut-off or the wrong organ removed.
It is a comfortable feeling to take out books, arrange them in a particular way so they can be referenced easily, to create a plan for learning what I need to know and then execute it. This is an ordered world, one I know well. A safe, predictable world. Today, I need that.
This paintbrush is a beautiful flowering plant, one you may already know, Castilleja integra, the Foothills Paintbrush. It’s in bloom right now, creating impressionist dashes of color as it flowers in otherwise green fields of cheatgrass and yucca.
Permit one thought on mortality. These plants in the foothills of the Rockies have long evolutionary histories, often involving millions of years and thousands of miles, some crossing continents as continental drift shaped and reshaped earth’s land masses. They grown on soil covering rock created in the Archean eon, preceded only by the Hadean. Plants, animals and one-celled creatures have been living and dying on the thin, fertile layer below them for millions of years.
Our own lives are part of that same living and dying, drawing our sustenance from the same thin layer. Yes, each individual life is unique and precious, but each individual life is also ordinary and unremarkable, life and death being not rare, but mundane.
The Unrhythm Method
Beltane New (Closing) Moon
Hard to get into a rhythm. All this health stuff. Narrows my world, makes it seem focused on what’s wrong, not what’s right. And a lot is right.
Take the mountains. Everchanging. You’d think they’d stay the same, these massive intrusions from beneath the earth’s crust. So solid. So there. But it’s not so. This month the precipitation has put fog all around us, Black Mountains lies obscured not far away. The Rockies look more like the Smokies.
As I have driven them this month, the Blue Ridge Parkway, civil war battles, the early days of the American revolution have stirred in my memory. But this is not the east. This is the arid west and its imprints are from the first nations, from the Spanish and the Mexicans. Here the early years of human habitation stretch back over 11,000 years. Here the lands had no fixed borders, but were fluid, changing as first nations grew and waned, moved.
Here the incursions came not from the east across the broad Atlantic, but from the south, up from Mexico. European contact here brought bull-fights and Spain, a colonial power, yes, but one inflected by the Mediterranean and the Romans rather than the Atlantic and the Celts, the Britons.
This is what I want to engage. But to do it, I have also have to deal with my health. The third phase.