• Category Archives Jefferson County

  • Pulses

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                               Mountain Spring Moon

    Under the mountain spring moon various shades of green have slowly, slowly begun to appear. The ponderosa pines have been green all winter but they’ve greened up some. The first ground cover green to appear was the bearberry when the snow melted back. This evergreen ground cover was green all along, just hidden. A shaded patch of moss has gone from a muted pale green to emerald over the last couple of weeks. There are, too, even here at 8,800 feet, dandelions. Some grass, too. Crab grass for sure, another hardy perennial. Tufts of grass that look like prairie drop seed, but are not, I’m sure, remain their winter tan.

    Too, the dogs have begun to sniff through the deck, smelling, I suppose, new rodents of some kind. Along with that has come Rigel digging. With the advent of warmer soil Rigel and Vega may begin creating holes in the rest of the yard as well. Another harbinger of spring.

    Birds chirp happily around 5:30-5:45 am as the sun begins to rise.

    Driving along Highway 78 (Shadow Mountain Drive, Black Mountain Drive (our segment) and Brook Forest Road) the only snow that remains is on the north side of the road or in shaded spots. A pond not far from our house still has ice, but the ice has a shallow layer of water over it. The mountain streams run, burble, ice now long melted and turned into stream. Willows along the streams look fire tipped as their branches turn a green gold. “Like dusted with gold,” Kate said.

    The mountain spring is a slow arriver, coming in pulses, alternated with sometimes heavy snows. We have the potential, for example, for a huge snow storm Wednesday through Friday.

    While on a drive Sunday, not far from our home, on top of a large outcropping of rock where the sun penetrated the trees, lay a fox, curled up and enjoying a quiet Sunday nap. The fox was a tan spot against the gray of the rock. Mule deer have begun to return as well, we see them at various places along the slopes and valleys. Kate just called and said, for example, that we have four deer in our front yard and “the dogs are levitating.” Sure enough, there they are, finding the green just as I have been.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Jefferson County Mountains Original Relation Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Shadow Mountain 📎and tagged

  • Getting There

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                             Mountain Spring Moon

    To get to the seder we left Conifer at about 3:30 and drove into Denver, ignoring I-70 traffic, “that I-70 mess” as our mortgage banker called, we stayed on Hwy 285 to Monaco and drove up through the city from south to north. This has the additional advantage–to my sensibilities–of seeing the city as it changes from southern suburbs to its northern most neighborhoods, passing on the way through an area with streets named Harvard, Yale, Bates, Vassar, then Wesley and Iliff. This last is also the name of a Methodist seminary located on the campus of Denver University.

    Going further north Monaco bisects the Cherry Hill neighborhood, a 1% enclave. Further on housing changes from low rise apartment complexes and condominiums to ranch style, one story smaller homes, but with big yards. Then Monaco becomes a four-lane boulevard with a park-like central strip and brick homes, some resembling small castles, others futuristic. Here the flowers bloom. Finally, we get to Martin Luther King, which extends to the eastern edge of Denver through the Stapleton new urbanism development. But we’ll turn on Pontiac, well before that.

    On Pontiac we enter a predominantly African-American neighborhood, a couple of blocks west of Quebec, formerly a boundary street for the old Stapleton Airport and along which hotels were built to accommodate air travelers. Behind the hotels grew up a community filled with one story homes with little square feet and often desperate looking lawns, sometimes littered. It includes, too, the same homes with neatly groomed topiary, lush grass and, on Jon and Jen’s block, some older two-story homes, residue of an era before the airport was built, probably of an era before Denver reached this far toward Kansas and Nebraska.

    Jon and Jen’s home was, according to house lore, originally a residence for a local farmer. Could be. They’ve done a lot of rehabilitation, adding on a new kitchen and dining area, plus a bedroom for themselves above. Jon’s done the bulk of the finishing work including tiling and plumbing two bathrooms. Outside Jon has several garden beds, fruit trees, a grape arbor, a tree house and a work shed where he produces hand-built skis.

     


    Family Jefferson County Mountains Travel

  • In Flight

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring, Mountain Spring Moon.

    The Latin work has begun to change, moving toward more careful, yet faster translation, a new novel is underway and my exercise program has altered. So, too, is this blog undergoing change. I don’t anticipate much difference in the work I do here, but the form needs to reflect a new reality, Colorado home.

    The mountains, the plants, the animals of this Western state press increasingly into our minds: scissor-tailed flycatchers, the fat fox, mule deer, mountain lions, Ponderosa and Lodgepole pine, Shadow Mountain, Black Mountain, Mt. Evans, Conifer Mountain. The drives into Denver, to Evergreen, to Aspen Park, toward the Kenosha Pass.

    When the travelers have settled, the way will appear.


    Colorado Jefferson County Mountains Shadow Mountain The West

  • Up Early

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                  Black Mountain Moon

    One of those nights. In spite of the warmth of my electric blanket I was awake at 3 a.m. For good. So I got up, let the dogs out, fed them, but didn’t go get the paper. (too early) It’s now 5:45 and I’m planning on working on Latin as soon as I finish this. Why waste the time?

    There was more snow on the deck this morning. Not so much, maybe an inch. I’d say we got 10 inches over the weekend. Snow here is both more present-it snows more often-and less. It melts soon after coming. This week the weather will be cool enough to retain the snow on the grounds, but it should be sunny enough to melt the driveway.

    I’m trying to increase my work. The long preparation for, then the execution of the move, distracted me at points, especially over the last couple of months. We needed our focus on the move and that’s where it was. Now though I want to write a new book, continue the work in Ovid and Caesar, dig into art scholarship, especially in aesthetics and Song Dynasty China, and get more deeply into my Reimagining Faith project by focusing on the concept of emergence.

    We have a plan for a modest garden using raised beds designed around horse watering troughs. They have a root-centric bottom up watering system and come ready to use. All we’ll have to do is site them and fill them with soil. I purchased material for a Flow Hive set-up like the one posted below, but it won’t come until November, so I’ll give the bees a pass this year. In April I take the first of several classes in a Native Plant Master program.

    Exercise is two-thirds of the way back to pre-move intensity and I’ve added three days.

    All this happens wrapped in regular visitation with grandchildren, Jon and Jen, going to movies, reconnoitering Denver and our immediate area around home: Jefferson County, Park County, Evergreen.

    Settling in. Becoming native to this place. A process.

     

     


    Art and Culture Bees Colorado Garden Jefferson County Latin Writing

  • Dialectic: Reason or Soul

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                     Black Mountain Moon

    When Kate and I went out last night, we went to a Regal cinema and afterward across the street to the Macaroni Grill for dinner. We could have been in any upper middle class retail enclave in the country. While there is a soothing, predictable quality to these often brick or stone centers, virtues not insignificant in a huge and varied nation like our own, we both commented that we could have been on France Avenue in Edina. In fact, we couldn’t tell the difference while inside the theater and eating at the Macaroni Grill. That’s ok once in a while, but visited frequently these standardized spaces can, like the electric light bulb, begin to blur, then obfuscate the true nature of a place.

    Becoming Native to This Place, the book by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute which I quote from time to time, is the antithesis of this form of shallow standardization. He insists, like Aldo Leopold in his land ethic and Wendell Berry in his work on his family’s farm in Kentucky, that we root ourselves, both literally and figuratively in the place where we live. Particularity, not universality is key to their thought.

    The core goal of Die Brücke, a movement among young Dresden based artists at the turn of the last century, was to embrace the German/Nordic soul, one based in the particular physicality of the soil and geography of Germany and the people’s nurtured by it, and give expression to that particularity, not the universality presumed by the application of reason.  Die Brücke rejected the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason, distanced themselves from art’s classical tradition, favoring the Fauves, other key French artists like Cezanne and Gaugin and the Dutch Van Gogh.

    This dialectic of reason and soul is a main theme of this new millennium, one with its trailhead deep in the ancientrail of Western philosophy. It may be the main theme of my life, a driving energy behind most of what I do.


    Art and Culture Colorado Jefferson County Our Land and Home

  • Snow Falls Twice Here

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                         Black Mountain Moon (New)

    With each snow here there are two separate snowfalls. The first happens when the snow begins, floating down to blanket the earth and the trees. The second snowfall may happen soon after, or be delayed by a day or two. When the weather pattern shifts, the winds come. They dislodge the snow gathered on the sloping branches of the lodgepole pine, a white mist of snow fans out from the branch, following the wind and a large clot of snow falls to the ground.

    This second snowfall is more gradual and more idiosyncratic than the first. It depends on how much snow stuck to the lodgepole’s branches, which direction the wind comes from, the sun’s melting the snow and obstructions that divert the wind through the trees. It happens in bursts of white, sometimes many in sequence, as if dominoes had toppled over. Sometimes only one branch dislodges its snow.

     


    Colorado Jefferson County Weather +Climate

  • The Acid Test

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Imbolc                                                                                       Settling Moon II

    The full settling moon has been beautiful these last couple of nights. We’re also in our shorts and t-shirts with non-alcoholic umbrella drinks. 66 degrees an hour ago, trending a bit down right now. Weird.

     

    Boiler inspection yesterday. Not such great news, apparently. Low ph in the boiler water. Acidic water no good for its copper pipes and internal workings. Not clear how it got there, so I’m having the water tested for a corrosive ph. Should I have discovered this before? Maybe. But I didn’t. Caveat emptor.

    GeoWater services will send a tech out to do a site visit and investigate the quality of our water. Could have been done before hand, but wasn’t. Sigh. You just can’t think of everything.

    I focused on water availability in this arid region. Did the well have supply? Yes. Did the production of the well, measured by flow rate, meet the needs of the typical home? Yes. Is the water acidic? Didn’t occur to me.

    The joys of home ownership. They never end, except after a sale. We’re ready right now to pass those joys over to some nice couple in Minnesota. Step up and lay your money on the table.

     


    Colorado Great Work Jefferson County Minnesota

  • The Fort

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                                                       Settling Moon II

     

    Took my sweetheart out to eat last night. We went to The Fort. This unusual restaurant is about 30 minutes from Conifer in Morrison, near the Red Rocks Amphitheater. It began as a suburban foothills home, but when the cost of the adobe construction began to exceed budget the lower level became a restaurant, The Fort, and the upper level family living space.

    The Fort models itself to some extent on Bent’s Fort, a trading post that was “the only major white American permanent settlement on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and the Mexican settlements” according to Wikipedia. (Bent’s Fort reconstruction)

    In addition to the adobe facade the Fort took as its guide the cuisine available in the 1830’s along the Santa Fe trail and served at Bent’s Fort.

    Kate and I chose their game plate:  “Our most popular dish! A bone-in Elk chop, Buffalo sirloin medallion, and a grilled teriyaki Quail. Served with seasonal vegetables, Fort potatoes, and wild Montana huckleberry preserves.” The buffalo was tender and cooked perfectly. The elk chop, while tasty with the huckleberry sauce, had some gristle. Kate enjoyed the quail.

    Our table over looked night time Denver in the distance to the east, twinkling in shimmers of air rising from the plain. It was not cheap, but the ambiance, the unusual menu and the company made it worthwhile.

     


    Colorado Cooking Jefferson County Mountains The West