Winter Settling II Moon
Exactly a month has passed since we got here. A lot of ordinary things have happened: boxes opened, license plates changed and driver’s licenses as well, found a vet, a place to do our business meetings, grocery store and pharmacies, furniture assembled. That sort of thing.
Each one of these and others like them have begun to layer over our Minnesota identities, helped us reorient to Colorado, to the mountains, to our new home. Like those Russian nesting dolls, we will not so much replace the Minnesota identity as overlay it with a new one, pushing the Indiana and Iowa, Wisconsin and Texas identities further down in our psyches. In that sense we are hyphenated so I am an Okie-Hoosier-Badger-Gopher-Coloradan while Kate is a Gopher-Iowa-Texas-Gopher-Coloradan.
Taking Gabe to the National Western Stock Show yesterday (Ruth got sick.) was a not so ordinary part of this process. Though I’ve taken the grandkids to the Stock Show for several years this was the first time I went as a Coloradan and Westerner. When the Westernaires, a precision and trick riding group from Jefferson County, rode out during the rodeo, we cheered. These were the home county kids.
The gestalt of being at the Stock Show was different, too. Before I would look at the rhinestone jeans, the oversized belt buckles, Stetson hats and cowboy boots as evidence of a different tribe, one that lived far from my Scandinavian minimalist home in Minnesota. Now I have to take them as my neighbors, my fellow Coloradans. That means I have to place myself among them, rather than apart from them. The difference may seem subtle, but in sizing up this new, outer layer of the nesting doll that I am, it makes a big difference.
Another gestalt that has a lot psychic friction is geological. Mountains not lakes, pines not deciduous, arid not wet, high not flat, thin dry air not moist heavy air. These are not subtle dialectics that gradually make themselves felt, but insistent, body changing realities that affect daily life. All this frisson enlivens me, makes me wake up to my world. It makes the change worthwhile.
