Samhain New (Winter) Moon
A public menorah lighting at the Lake House in Evergreen tonight. Kate and I are going. There’s also a latke cook-off and I look forward to helping assess the entrants. Evergreen is a downhill ride, 7,200 feet to our 8,800. We take county 78, which starts out at county 73 as Shadow Mountain Drive, changes, very near our house to Black Mountain Drive, and then, 2 miles further down mountain toward Evergreen, becomes Brook Forest Drive. It’s a curvy, forested, rocky road with the Arapaho National Forest on both sides for much of the way.
A joy of mountain living is that the quotidian can be extraordinary. On these drives we often encounter mule deer, elk, occasionally fox. Kate saw what must have been a mountain lion, long and catlike, slink away from the road. In the spring snow melt fills Shadow Creek, Deer Creek, Cub Creek with water churning and roiling. As the snow melt wanes, these same creeks become lazy wandering streams and must, in drier years, lose their water altogether at some point.
The flora, seemingly sparse in that only two species of tree, lodgepole and aspen, live in any numbers at our altitude, changes once in the fall to a minimalist palette of gold and green. Once the golden aspen leaves become skirts, the trunks of these trees become bony fingers, white and twisted. In the spring the green leaves return and the mountain views become more uniform for a time.
Black Mountain, Shadow Mountain, Conifer Mountain and all the others around our neighborhood change, too. The flora goes up and down them, different with the seasons, but on display in often vertiginous falls and in huge rock gardens where outcroppings are bare but surrounded by trees. At night the mountain sides light up with homes also up and down, a sort of external dwarfheim, often invisible in the day. Precipitation, especially snow, alters the mountains immediately, sometimes obscuring them, most often painting white over their peaks and valleys.
We have found a new place to live, our mountain home. It suits us now.
