"I feel like a stranger here in this place. Nothing even comes close to looking familiar to me. I wish I could see way over the mountains. They close me in too much and I think someone needs to bulldoze a big wide hole so I can see back home to Kansas. I'll never make any friends here. I can't believe how hard it is to get to places here. Why in the heck does every road have a number on it? What were those people thinking? Geesch, everywhere I look around here there's a mountain or something. Can't there be just one little spot that has nothing in it? Oh great, here come the monsoons rains again and you know what that is going to do to the yard! Can't even hang clothes on the clothesline when the ground is like that. Shoot, the soil is so filled with clay around these parts that sure as can be, it'll turn to the consistency of wet cement. Thank goodness the deer are in the yard. At least they are my friends. What?? They gave that guy a deer tag to take one of them this season? Even my sunflowers refuse to grow here in this land and my zinnias? Well they gave up the "ghost" about two weeks after I planted them. My geraniums, holy cow! They are just sitting there in the pots I planted them in and they refuse to grow too. Oh man, I sure miss being around kids. I feel like a teacher lost in the wilderness right now. Wish that Mike would get home from work soon. At least I know him :) I miss my family and I want to see them. Wow, what I wouldn't give to be sitting in the drive through at Bogey's right now, ordering a medium Diet Vanilla Pepsi with extra ice right now! What in the world was I thinking?"
It does me much good to stop and reflect, to write those words of how I felt in the initial days and weeks here in Montrose, Colorado. Those kinds of negative thoughts were my worst enemies in the beginning of my new life as the wife of a wonderful man named Mike Renfro. They held me back, keeping me from moving on in the new chapter of this pretty much "crazy" life of mine :) I could say over and over again that I wish that I would not have had to endure those difficult days but now in retrospect I know that it was probably necessary that I did. It was a part of "the plan" for me to go through them. The growth on my part was very painful, some days nearly more than I could bear, but I made it. The road was long and filled with twists and turns, some pretty deep valleys and more potholes than some of the old blacktop roads in Kansas. Yet somehow I survived and it's with a grateful heart that I can say that.
We live here in Montrose just outside the city limits in an old 100 + year old farmhouse. It's an interesting place, as houses go. Our landlord is a farmer, a great guy that puts me in mind of my childrens' grandfather, the late Runold Hemman of Coffeyville, Kansas. We are surrounded by alfalfa fields and when they started to grow and bloom last summer, I began to realize that the sight of crops growing (even if they weren't wheat fields like back home) was very soothing to me. Never will forget the first time they baled up the hay, late one summer evening this past June. Mike and I sat there and watched them go round and round, entertained by something that was a great memory for me from long ago when I was a kid growing up on a farm. Just a month or so, after parent-teacher conferences at school, I met a very nice woman who had come to her daughter's third-grade conference. When she found out I was from Kansas and that I missed seeing the wheat harvest back there, she told me that I should come out to their place this summer and see their harvest of wheat. I couldn't believe it! Wheat? People GREW wheat here? I had never realized it, really never thought there was any on this side of the mountain.
There's a spare bedroom here in our house and mostly we used it for storage, especially for all of the stuff that I moved out here from back in Kansas. We don't have a lot of extra space and at first, most of the boxes I brought out just sat there doing absolutely nothing. Because of my initial bouts of such extreme homesickness, I just couldn't bear the thought of looking at any of them. Kind of pathetic, I know. What few things I did put out for use never really seemed like they were in the right place. I never could figure out where to put things so they seemed "natural" in their setting. I knew where they belonged in my old house and now they too seemed like strangers to me. It was a losing battle and after months of fighting it, I was just about ready to give up. You know, throw in the towel? But then came a gallon of "paper bag" brown paint and the chance to turn life around and to find a little familiarity.
It took a while, but Mike and I picked up paintbrushes and began to turn that spare bedroom into a place where I could finally begin to find some peace. We pulled out all of the old furnishings, save for a neat old metal bed, and began the process of rearranging things so I could put up things from my old home and my old life back in Kansas. It ended up being a mixture of a lot of memories for me, all of them great ones by the way. We took the shelving units off of the mud porch and turned them into bookcases for all of the books that I'd stored in boxes. A coat of light creamy yellow paint made them look nearly new to me. One of the smaller ones became a place to put my old albums from my life in the '70s and I moved the wonderful record player that two of my former students gave me a year or so back, to the top. I began to dare to put up other things that meant a lot to me, things that only a few months prior would have made me too sad to see. "Out of sight, out of mind" had been my motto and the way that I dealt with being so lonely and sad, homesick for home. Now it feels good, REALLY good to be able to enjoy them once again.
I've come a long ways in my journey here and I guess when you have to take "baby steps" to do it, then it's going to take a while to get to where you are going. It's nice to finally find some familiarity in this life here. I've been blessed to make friends with a lot of good people and I no longer feel like I am totally alone. I don't get lost near as much as I used to in the beginning and now it makes perfect sense that these roads have numbers and a lot of them. The mountains and I reached a "truce" of sorts, actually some time back now. It will be a while, not sure how long that "while" will be, before I can say that I love the sight of them more than I love the flatlands of the Midwest. But I'm working on that. There is no Bogey's here but when I go back home to Hutch, you can be sure that I get my fill. Mike still goes to work each day and some days it's late when he gets back. But I leave to go to work as well and when your days are filled with the laughter and voices of 10-year olds, then I'm not sure that a person could ask for more.
"Wow, look at the mountains today! They are really shimmering with all that snow on top of them. What's that one called? Oh yeah, that's the Grand Mesa :) Sorry I keep asking that but it's so dang big. I didn't figure that it could still be the same one that we saw back in Olathe. Let's go eat tonight at Amelia's. They have such good food. I like that place. Come look quick! The deer came back. How old do you think those are? Can you stop in at school and say "hello" to the kids today? They think that "Mr. Renfro" is a nice guy. Ask Mel and Margaret if they'd like to meet us for lunch up at Grand Junction this weekend. Sure is nice to have good friends like them. Did I tell you that I saw Pat at the Laundromat today? They want us to come and watch the game with them this weekend. We had a great day at school today. I'm sure proud of what those kids are doing in their math fact timings. I talked to Grahame and Ursela today, both of them! Everything is fine back there in Kansas. I'll go back some time to see them soon. Thank God for a granddaughter :) Can't wait to get there to see that little one. What would I do without Facebook? It's like being in two "homes" at once. I'll make it, surely I will. You were right.....thanks for believing that I would, even though I was sure that I wouldn't."
Have a beautiful Saturday my dear friends and family, wherever you might be this good day of ours. I don't care if I've said it a million times. Here is time number 1,000,000 and 1~
"I love you guys one and all! I am grateful that you are my friends and that you care enough about me to worry from time to time. A person needs that kind of friend, you know? My heart is filled with memories of a life back in Kansas and it continues to be filled with new memories from here along the Western Slopes. I've decided that it's ok to remember all of my life back there and equally fine to fill my heart up with new memories here in this place along the Rocky Mountains. Probably a darn good thing that my parents gave me such a huge heart because it's starting to get a little crowded in there. But if everyone would just skoosh over a bit, there's room for plenty more."
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| It all started underneath a basketball goal~ |
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