~and I survived~

April 7, 2013 was a long time ago now.
4 years of a long time ago.

I always smile when I see this picture of a day when I had some high hopes of bringing a little bit of Kansas with me to the state of Colorado.  For the record, I tried.  Further for the record, it didn't really work out all that well.

I was 6 weeks away from getting married to Mike when this picture was taken.  I'd made a journey out to southwestern Colorado to bring out more of my belongings from home in south central Kansas.  Tucked into a manila envelope on the back seat were several packages of sunflower seeds.  For years I had always planted a row of them along the fence in my backyard in Hutchinson and I didn't intend to stop the practice just because I was leaving for a new home high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.  

Mike worked the soil up before I got there and so it would have seemed to be quite easy to just start poking them one by one into the ground.  You would think.

It didn't take long to figure out that this land was not going to be the same.  The mountain earth didn't feel so good running through my fingers but I didn't quit.  Happily I continued to work along the fence row adjacent to the alfalfa field until I had reached the end of the fence and my packets of seeds.  

When I arrived back in late May, I figured surely that they would all be sprouted up and standing tall to welcome me to a new life.  It was sad to see that hardly any of that massive amount of seeds that I had sown into the earth was able to make it.  In fact as I started to look, only about 20 of them had sprouted and grew at all.  Of that amount only about 12 actually made it to fruition and bloomed later on in the summer.

But hey.  
At least I had some.

It was an interesting first summer out there, one in which I learned a whole bunch about myself.  Even though I was horribly homesick and felt a dire sense of "I'm not going to make it here in this place", I held on.

And just like this Russian Mammoth sunflower,
I survived.