Living in a Postcard
This weekend funnydad said, "It's like we live in a postcard." He's right. The mountains are omnipresent, and they never cease to be beautiful. I can be grumpy, turn west, and that vista just takes my breath away -- cheers me up, if only for a minute. When, on occasion, fog obscures the mountains the whole town feels flat, both figuratively and literally. Things are out of sorts 
until the sun burns off the fog and gives us back our mountains. In New York fog would sometimes cover the top of the Empire State Building, and when that happened it would be fun, an anomoly, a "hey look" catch-it-before-it's-gone kind of sight. Weird, but if you weren't within sight of the Empire State Building you might miss it. Here, when the mountains are missing there's no escaping it. I feel ungrounded. Boulder's specialness is gone. May as well be in a small town anywhere. Makes me realize how tied to the mountains this community, its identity, and my understanding of it is. Maybe that's why it happens -- don't know what you have until it's gone, mother nature style.
We went to the Rocky Mountain National Park on Sunday with the funny bunnies' visiting New York Grandma. The park entrance is about an hour's drive from our front door, short enough that I think we'll become regulars (we bought an annual pass). As we approached, the higher mountains in the background began to show their winter coat of snow and the aspen trees became more prominent -- up there they were turning sooner than at Boulder's lower altitude. I didn't know about aspen trees until moving here. They only turn golden yellow, no red or orange, and they grow in stands mingled into ponderosa pine and other mountain conifers. So, you look across a valley at a roadside overlook and see a sea of green pine trees with veins of yellowy-orange aspen trees. (In these photos, look in the background. You'll see areas that look like small wildfires -- those are stands of aspen.) It's quite striking, words hardly do it justice. Maybe next fall you can come visit and we'll take you on what our Colorado guide book calls, "one of the most spectacular drives in North America." I don't think the book is exaggerating -- and to think, we've only seen one small part of this park. It's a large National Park, taking up most of the northwest corner of Colorado.
Funny dad and his mother saw a large heard of elk (I was asleep in the car.) We saw several kinds of birds we'd never seen. I've been enjoying the birds here, mostly in our yard. We have a bird feeder now, and a small family of house
finches (and their nest over our deck). This photo is of one of the male house finches, I think an immature male. Isn't he pretty? Most of our birds are fairly normal song/perching birds, but I'm happy to have them and nearly giddy about our house finches and our red-breasted nuthatches. We also have mountain chickadees, black-capped chickadees, and the regular assortment of sparrows. There are robins and blue jays around, but thankfully the blue jays stay away from our feeder. Blue Jays are not nice birds and would boss around the house finches I've become so fond of. They're like my first friends here in Boulder. They come by every day to say hi, and I enjoy their company.
until the sun burns off the fog and gives us back our mountains. In New York fog would sometimes cover the top of the Empire State Building, and when that happened it would be fun, an anomoly, a "hey look" catch-it-before-it's-gone kind of sight. Weird, but if you weren't within sight of the Empire State Building you might miss it. Here, when the mountains are missing there's no escaping it. I feel ungrounded. Boulder's specialness is gone. May as well be in a small town anywhere. Makes me realize how tied to the mountains this community, its identity, and my understanding of it is. Maybe that's why it happens -- don't know what you have until it's gone, mother nature style.
We went to the Rocky Mountain National Park on Sunday with the funny bunnies' visiting New York Grandma. The park entrance is about an hour's drive from our front door, short enough that I think we'll become regulars (we bought an annual pass). As we approached, the higher mountains in the background began to show their winter coat of snow and the aspen trees became more prominent -- up there they were turning sooner than at Boulder's lower altitude. I didn't know about aspen trees until moving here. They only turn golden yellow, no red or orange, and they grow in stands mingled into ponderosa pine and other mountain conifers. So, you look across a valley at a roadside overlook and see a sea of green pine trees with veins of yellowy-orange aspen trees. (In these photos, look in the background. You'll see areas that look like small wildfires -- those are stands of aspen.) It's quite striking, words hardly do it justice. Maybe next fall you can come visit and we'll take you on what our Colorado guide book calls, "one of the most spectacular drives in North America." I don't think the book is exaggerating -- and to think, we've only seen one small part of this park. It's a large National Park, taking up most of the northwest corner of Colorado.
Funny dad and his mother saw a large heard of elk (I was asleep in the car.) We saw several kinds of birds we'd never seen. I've been enjoying the birds here, mostly in our yard. We have a bird feeder now, and a small family of house
finches (and their nest over our deck). This photo is of one of the male house finches, I think an immature male. Isn't he pretty? Most of our birds are fairly normal song/perching birds, but I'm happy to have them and nearly giddy about our house finches and our red-breasted nuthatches. We also have mountain chickadees, black-capped chickadees, and the regular assortment of sparrows. There are robins and blue jays around, but thankfully the blue jays stay away from our feeder. Blue Jays are not nice birds and would boss around the house finches I've become so fond of. They're like my first friends here in Boulder. They come by every day to say hi, and I enjoy their company.
Comments