Colorado

There’s a fine line between surrender and submersion while gliding through the bluest of skies.

The elevation from sea level to the empty space above the clouds slips with the slow descent into the green valley between the slate grey and blue mountains, confusing the experience of being high.

Falling deep into the cliché of ‘what goes up must come down’, you surrender to the comfort of stepping off a plane leaving the city behind while greeted with cowboy hats and the still peaks you have gazed upon through a million blinks like a clicking slide show presentation changing only with the color scales of the alternating seasons.

If you cared to capture it all, the blinks of your eyes would out number the stars cast and falling from above.

The smell of ozone from mountain air is undoubtedly different then the layered smells of take-out, rubber and concrete. Even while in the city, you seek the familiar aroma of rich red sauce cooled with ground corn, and fresh eggs as it melts the cold air while the morning light casts diamonds on the blanket of blinding snow.

Outside, steamy cow’s breath hangs and holds in the cold air like a cloud of wet grain and hay. Their large, soft eyes stare into space beyond their slow, nearly lazy crooked chewing.

The steam rising from warm horses meshes with the smell of hay and the cold air entangles with the dusty smell of worn leather seeping from the barn where curry combs and bag balm sit still on the wooden shelf next to the old coffee can containing used horseshoe nails.

There are places you visit that hold a memory and a scent that refreshes the days before.

Your mind becomes entrapped by the haunting realization columbines are just a little bluer than you could last remember and the stars seem fewer.

You will try to rationalize this with the draw of city dwellers bringing with them light pollution while denying yourself the sobriety that it is only the advancement of time while your intoxication is on the fixated desire for all to stand still like the portrait you have painted in your mind so while you grow, home should always remain the same.

There’s a need to hold the nostalgia and a never ending wish to bottle the essence of time, space, flavors and people. As you try to breath it in, you find yourself fighting for the lost time as the dust on the winds of change become your ol’ dog, sorrel horse and your beloved ones souls that you once gathered with delight on the earth plane as they now fall sometimes like snow but consistently into the fold of the land where the Indian paintbrush, prairie fire and sage grow.

You wonder if the slow honey on your biscuit is from the clover grown in the pasture of rich soil and whistling grass that once was caught under your nails and as you made mud pies along the river to bake in the high, hot desert sun when you were a girl wearing dandelions in your hair. All the while you listen to the stillness, the rocking and hissing of a pressure cooker perfecting pinto beans.

We come here not to feel a top of the mountain where the clouds roll around our ankles but to get high on the higher perspective, earth and pine laden air while the refeshent of the cold rivers cool the land as they stream from mountain tops to the basen of the sand beds. You come here for the place of line dried bed linens, hatch green chilies, brushing horse tails, water skippers, gathering eggs and the raspy chatter of magpies. You listen to music that reminds you of standing on your father’s feet learning the two step, while rolling out your grandmas perfected, flakey, pie crust with her flour dusted wooden pin awaiting the fresh picked tart cherries from the old tree.

You do this to remember, to relive, to self-sooth. You do this as a right and ritual, to carry, to hold.

Welcome, I am all that you are. I am Home.