~as I have grown and changed~

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:  A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted."  From the "Good Book", Ecclesiastes 3

It was nearly a year ago that I made the journey way across the mountains, from my home on the plains of Kansas and over Monarch Pass, down into the valley that houses the little city of Montrose, Colorado.  I came as a newly married, newly retired Kansas schoolteacher who would be facing many weeks ahead fighting homesickness and the strong desire to give up the thought that I could even dream to survive here in the mountains. 

I tried doing a lot of things in my new home here along the Western Slopes, things that would remind me of my life in Kansas and the happiness that I had always known there.  One of those things was to plant sunflowers, geraniums, and zinnias in the flowerbeds and along the fence row that lies adjacent to the alfalfa fields.  I started putting seeds in the ground during one my visits in early April, even before Mike and I had gotten married.  I was positive that they would grow and flourish, just like I would. 

Hundreds of seeds were planted that day in the hopes that by summer time we'd be seeing a flower garden that would rival any that I had ever planted back in Reno County, Kansas.  Yet even though hundreds of seeds went into the Colorado soil that weekend, only a few flowers actually sprouted forth from them.  It was disheartening to see the results, or lack of them, as the summer months came upon us.

A whopping grand total of 7 sunflowers made it through though and I babied those things as if they were the last sunflowers alive on earth  before the "Great Sunflower Extinction".  Even the strong early morning winds off of Cerro Summit could not dissuade those Russian Mammoths.  I tried to enjoy them each and every day for all they were worth.  The zinnias, well those guys never made it, save for a couple of scrawny sprouts that quickly died in the clay soil around our home.  I totally decided to give up on the idea of them ever making it here and sadly threw away the plant markers that I had created for them.

So hey, I tried geraniums.  Always back in Kansas I had great luck with getting those things to grow.  Shoot, I'd usually put at least 4 dozen of those things into pots and watch them grow all summer long in my back yard.  I'd make the journey down to the local Ace Hardware on the corner of 14th and Main and buy as many as I could when they were put on sale for 98 cents each on Mother's Day weekend.  What beauty all of the different colors provided the house and yard.  But even those plants didn't seem to do all that well in the Colorado earth last summer.  They didn't DIE but they didn't GROW either.  Growing things was something I had always enjoyed doing but it just wasn't happening for me in those early days back in the summer of 2013.  Now as I sit back and think about it, I finally have figured out what went wrong.  Well, at least a good part of it.

I realize just how much I was struggling with life here in this new place that I now call home and when you are "wrestling" day to day with things that you are up against it's pretty hard to do anything except to take care of yourself.  The truth is that I wasn't even doing that very well.  But as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, slowly things started to get better.  What once seemed like a very hopeless idea eventually turned into something that wasn't so scary after all.  I had survived the first season here along the Western Slopes and lived to tell the story :)

On our recent trip to the Mojave desert area of California, I decided to bring back a souvenir of the "living kind" to enjoy for some time to come at home here in Colorado.  I have always enjoyed seeing pictures of beautiful succulents that folks have grown in small containers, admiring the variety of the textures and the colors.  So I had this idea that maybe I could make the same kind of thing to put out on the front deck here at home.  We purchased a group of seven of them at the local Walmart in Twentynine Palms and as they sat in the cart while we waited to pay for them, in my mind I was already dreaming of how they might look once they were planted and taking off.  Our car was already packed to the point of "critical mass" and the little box of succulents was the very last thing to be loaded in on that Saturday morning.  I didn't care how we were going to do it, whether I had to hold them on my lap the whole way or not, I was going to get those things home and nurture them into living.  Two evenings past, I spent time putting them into an arrangement and added a few of the small pebbles that I had picked up along the Puget Bay shoreline to remember the journey I had been blessed to take.

Here it is, finally done!  Those seven plants have some of the strangest of names, can't even remember them all.  But as I finished putting the last tiny stone around the base of the Silver Dollar plant, I came to a great self-reflection and I shared it with Mike, who totally understood me.   All last summer as I fought with the clay soil around here trying to make something grow from it, I was doing it for the wrong reason.  I just wanted to make everyone happy including Mike.  I wasn't doing it for myself which would stand to reason as to why  I always felt like my heart wasn't in it.  After I finished getting this arrangement in the soil, I was satisfied.  The truth was that I finally had put something into the earth that made me very happy.  The strangest thing was this....the clay soil hadn't changed but I had.  THAT was a nice feeling.

Yesterday in the huge stack of mail that had come while we were gone, there was a box from the RH Shumway Company containing the seeds we had ordered for our garden this year.  Nestled midway down in the box were 5 packages of zinnia seeds that I added to the order at the last minute.  I'm going to give those things yet another try this summer and see if I can pay more attention to where I put them in hopes that they CAN actually make it this time around.  Who knows?  What's the harm in trying?   :)

The clock on the kitchen wall is telling me that it's time to get a "move on", get dressed for school and head out the door to find "the 18".  We are down to our last few weeks together and so very much lies ahead of us to do yet before they can walk out the door on the last day of school.  I have come to many awakenings as of late and one of those realizations is that I will miss them more than I can possibly imagine.  Those 9 and 10-year olds have helped me tremendously in this growing and changing time of my life.  Being their teacher was a gift to me, a totally unexpected blessing in this new land.  I will never forget them and I hope they will remember me as well.

Have a great day everyone out there!  It's the 8th day of April in the year 2014 and a great day to be alive in.  Remembering you all, my dear friends and family, this day.

From the top of Cerro Summit, where the winds always seem to blow in the hours of the early morning.  We caught sight of the sunset there one evening in late September and it was beautiful.