“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,…
at the palms of surrender Blue ships disappear there swallowed by a red sun mouth closing around them in prayer. It’s grit your teeth time on the mountain—the season of no light and perma-snow. Even though the calendar says the light is returning–as does my good friend Tyler who first counts, then reports, the minutes on Facebook like announcing salvation–the 20ish minutes we’ve gained since the Solstice is not enough for me. Mornings, I…
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…
For years, I could see the Indian Peaks from the deck of the little cabin. My life was oriented east-west. The sun rose at my back and set in front of me. And the mountains to the west—always the west along the Front Range of Colorado—anchored me in the middle of a compass. “The mountains are west,” we say to tourists and new-combers trying to figure out where they are. When I moved to Milwaukee…
These past weeks have been a rush of busy-ness. Fall on the mountain always feels fleeting, with glorious pockets of gold aspens one week and new snow the next. Each year, I’m surprised at the suddenness in the change of season. There’s an urgency in the air as I try to take in one last dinner on the deck, one last long hike in the high country, all the while getting and stacking wood and…