Category: Colorado

This was going to be a very different holiday season from past years when Cary and I had gone to Nepal for the better part of November and December. Instead, after visiting Nepal and South Korea, Cary headed to China to teach English to Tibetan monks and, in turn, study Tibetan, and I went off to visit my other daughter, Martha, in Colorado, and get some sunshine and mountain hiking. Whatever happened, we knew it would be an adventure. It was!

Photo by Doug Hammond

Kissing the Manitou Springs bear

For the first two weeks Martha and I visited some lovely places near her home in Manitou Springs, with 14,000 ft Pikes Peak rising above us. We went on interesting, relaxing walks in old Colorado City, and strolled among the red rocks of the Garden of the Gods. Glorious vistas! Then we enjoyed a joyous family Christmas with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Click on a photo to enlarge.

Garden of the Gods

Martha leads the way

Can you see the iconic Kissing Camels?

Up close!

How quickly life can change! Was it the higher altitude and the dry climate and the extreme cold? No. I’d been here before and I was no stranger to winter. I began coughing uncontrollably and as the New Year approached, multifocal pneumonia exploded in my lungs. On January 2nd I found myself in the emergency room needing oxygen, gasping for breath. Happy New Year! Cary rushed back from China and after a week of skilled care from the doctors and nurses at the Grandview Hospital, she and Martha pulled me back from the brink, which is what it seemed to me. I learned first-hand what devotion and love look like. Credit also goes to Doug Hammond, Martha’s partner, whose sense of humor and endless stories, especially keeping things light after the pipes froze in the kitchen (no blame…it was minus 3 degrees), added a feeling of adventure to my personal almost-disaster.

The three musketeers leaving for the airport, oxygen and all.

Then we had the hurdle of flying back to Seattle with a portable oxygen concentrator that required lots of airline paper work. No small feat. God bless Cary for handling it all! I hope none of you ever has to deal with this. She got us back to Whidbey Island and dealt with all the deliveries, company visits and pick-ups, like a veteran. Now I’m almost back to normal and have one salient word of advice: Never let a cough get the best of you, and stay away from pneumonia!

On the bright side…spring is popping up all around me. Hailing from the frigid East Coast, it’s always a miracle to see flowers blooming in February.

First daffodils of spring

Orchids in the dining room

Snowdrops in the cemetery

Of course, Whidbey’s rain helps a lot. Cary has already started bok choy, lettuce, and peas for early spring planting. The earth is waking up. I’m so enjoying the radiance of the sun, and everything seems more vibrant. It’s great to be alive!

The one thing that our island children are missing, however, is our plethora of feral bunnies…the result of escaped 4-H domesticated rabbits from the Island County Fairgrounds. Some people loved them…gardeners and farmers called them pests. But children found them adorable and couldn’t get enough of feeding and chasing them. I spent lots of time photographing them. A catastrophic pandemic of Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease suddenly wiped them all out last summer. Langley, the Northwest Rabbit Capital, just wasn’t the same.

But, just last week on my daily walk I spotted a small tan rabbit scurrying across the field. Hmmm, could it be? Take heart, children, they’ll be back. Yes, it made me very happy.

I was also very happy to welcome my old friend and theater buff Arpie Maros, whom I have known since the days when he and my children were in high school together. He’s a talented actor and singer and the owner of Ahrre’s Coffee Roastery with two locations in New Jersey (Westfield and Summit). He also combines his charm and talent hosting house concerts with touring singer-songwriters. Be sure to visit his website: www.ahrre.com

Arpie comes to the Northwest four times a year to visit his friends, and see if the sun is shining. Ha ha! I’m one of the lucky ones.

Oh Meg! What do you think is going to happen next?

In late June when I was in Colorado, I planned to write a blog telling how wonderful it was to be rid of THE MASK for the first time in over a year. And to walk down the street and smile and make small talk. To mingle. And to see how interesting humans were when they unveiled their lower face and you didn’t have to depend on the eyes, alone, for communication. Those sparkling, sober, sad, questioning, sometimes disapproving eyes.

And then I stepped off the plane in Denver into a wall of 104 degree heat. There went the brain. There went the will. There went the energy. For the first four days friends and family were treated to Meg, the Zombie. I felt as if I were swimming upstream in a river of molten lava. Have faith and be patient, they all said. You’re a mile high and it’s hot (no kidding). You have to acclimatize.

“Who me? I’m used to 18,000 ft. in the Himalayas. What’s a paltry 7,000 ft. You’ve got to be kidding.”

But they weren’t. They would simply have to be satisfied with monosyllables and wan smiles until, miraculously, I was reborn. And the irony of it is that the temperature plummeted to 62 on the day I left and I flew into 95 and climbing temperatures in Seattle. And into the next week we were treated to 100 before returning to normal. A little taste of global warming. If only “forewarned is forearmed” were true.

Here are some photos of my visit to my friend Bonnie Phipps and her husband, Bill Moninger, in Boulder. She is not only an autoharpist par excellence but also the designer of this exquisite garden.

Bonnie Phipps

Bonnie’s beautifully designed garden

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Doug and Martha

I enjoyed a lively visit in Arvada with my granddaughter and great grandchildren en route Manitou Springs, where my daughter, Martha, and her partner, Doug Hammond, live. They bought a charming Victorian house on a hill (the whole town is hills!) with a view of Pikes Peak, and are surrounded by woods and greenery and lots of steep walkways. Because of the heat the hiking was curtailed, but there’s always the future. We did take a stroll in the famous Valley of the Gods, as prelude to future walks in the valley and hills of the Rockies. And, BTW, the restaurants are superb in the area. Especially in the cool breezes if evening.

My photographs are greatly limited because of my heated “vegetative” state. The fellowship was wonderful, but I would have preferred having it in the Arctic!

Mother and daughter

Hiking in the Valley of the Gods

The Local Relic Artisan Ales and Immerse Cuisine

Martha has been creating a terraced garden that the local deer are also enjoying.

The invader

About to eat Martha’s flowers

And here is a short slide show to let you know that Whidbey Island is still blooming and weathering the summer heat.

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I would like to end with a poem that flowed out of me during the darkest days of the pandemic. Humorous with a touch of pathos. I had totally forgotten it, but I think it says what many of us felt as we attempted to circumnavigate the new reality of the past year. Lots of lives were upended but lots of soul-searching also took place. True. It was not all bad. But for many it was the end.

Senior Pandemic Blues

The children are worried. “She seems so disorganized…even more
Than usual,” they say
Then there’s the book, oh, no, it’s no longer relevant. Was it ever
Relevant? Yes, it’s hilarious. I know I’ll finish it after I tweak
The cast of characters.
Don’t talk about dinner, I can’t think about dinner, please
I’ll take a walk in the woods if it would only stop raining. You know I hate
The rain and I need to see that play being streamed from New York.
I miss the theater so much but I don’t mention it. I’d be accused
Of complaining. Nothing is settled. The new phone, so complicated, the camera, health insurance,
It all takes so much time. I will die “on hold’ with Verizon. Let them pay
For my funeral.
NO I’m not depressed. The cedars are beautiful, their feathery leaves dripping
With water, the ferns in their crispness, resisting the 40° weather and
Lifting their fronds to meld with the fog
The interminable fog….
No, I am not complaining.

The computer calls. The New York Times. The Washington Post
I must read them all and oh, the TV and
YouTube have so much I can enjoy…don’t you want me to enjoy
During this dreadful time? Winter is coming, some call these the
Dark days. I used to be free, but my life is now curtailed; I can’t travel, I am beholden
To a mask for my peregrinations. Is this not a cause for worry?
Does my mind ever stop, for meditative bliss is at my
Fingertips. Dinner. Don’t speak to me about dinner, again.
I am lucky. I am not unemployed. I am not homeless. But I am
Not happy, not fulfilled any more. I miss friends, groups, crowds,
Parties. What gives life meaning? Do I still have a reason to exist? I am a hermit.
I can sit all day and sort memorabilia and
I can go mad. Now why don’t I play my violin or finish my book?
Let’s sit on the beach and watch the sun go down;
The beach is deserted. The beach is peaceful. Only lapping water.
The world turns, chaos continues, the sun goes down.
No, I am not complaining.

I hope you are all taking some time to groove on the holidays, enjoy your family, and make plans for what I hope is a healthier, more thoughtful, compassionate, and peaceful year ahead.

I seldom put personal information or political opinions in my blog, but I’ve received so many wonderful year end reports from friends, who press me for basic information, that I’m sending them and you the sketchiest of news. This is a first for me. I’m not known for brevity.

My youngest son, Robert, is off to Shenzhen, China, on business, leaving his wife, Gwen, in Orlando, Florida, to hold down the fort for their golf entertainment enterprise, Glowgear. My daughter, Martha, has returned to her home in Denver, Colorado, after three months of teaching Essential Somatics in the U. K., Ireland, and Australia, to be on hand when her daughter, Cally, gives birth to a second son in January (what does that make me…a great grandmother, again? Can’t be!). I shall be joining the Denver wing of the family for Christmas while Cary and Tom are staying in Langley, with the school farm program and Tom’s house building at the Upper Langley affordable cohousing community going swimmingly. Grandson Adam and his girlfriend, Allie, are in New Jersey tearing up cyber space with various innovations. Grandson Thomas, a prolific writer of fantasy fiction, will greet me in Denver before he makes his way to Portland, Oregon, to embrace a new job and that soothing winter rain. Cary and I miss going to Nepal, but the holiday season brings a lot of wonderful connections with stateside family, friends, concerts and theater that we don’t find trekking in the Himalayas.

And to all of you…a wonderful Christmas and jolly holidays. And try not to behave yourselves….

(Stay tuned for more reports of my trip to Mongolia last summer!)

View of Puget Sound from Cascade Avenue in Langley, WA on a sunny December day.