The arrival of Spring catches me off guard. As the planet tips the hemisphere where I live to equal night and day, I have forgotten its quickening. These long months in lockdown have me subdued. I’ve kept myself flattened for so long that I’ve forgotten what deep full breathing feels like. Scarcity is a second skin. One I wear far too easily. More difficult is to let it slough away. Today I realized the discipline…
“One must have a mind of winter” –Wallace Stevens I learned what it means to be human at the hands of winter. It came to me in a bleak time, when I’d retreated to a cabin in the Rocky Mountains to live alone with my dog, after a series of gut-punching losses that triggered dread for each dawning day. It was February—for me, the darkest month of the year, a month so brittle and cold,…
If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to prepare for and survive disaster. I’ve spent over twenty years living at elevations above 8000 feet in places threatened by fire and flood and I’ve had a bit of practice making evacuation’s hard choices: what to take and what to leave behind. During the 2003 Overland Mountain Fire—then the largest fire in Boulder County history–I loaded a bed and food for my dog,…
On May 1st of this year—Beltane—Greg and I eloped. I’d settled on the day because on the pagan calendar it’s the time when “sweet desire weds wild delight,” and May is a month burgeoning with hope and dewy new things yet to reveal themselves. Even though we’d been together almost eight years, marriage seemed like a mysterious continent for me, the cowgirl who’d lived a solitary life for so long. That morning, we see the…
For this post, I excerpt the prologue of my memoir, Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living, a Colorado Book Award Finalist, out in paperback on June 4th. The passage details the cabin fire that claimed all my possessions and most of my writing two months before I turned 40 in the Spring of 2004. The challenges of high altitude spring have been much on my mind as my corner of the Rockies has expierenced…