Last Friday morning, I backed out of my garage promptly at nine am, headed for Colorado. Specifically, for the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities to attend the annual Colorado Authors’ League Awards banquet. It’s an eight-hour drive to Arvada, and the first six hours were glorious. (The photo at the top of the post is the Wind River Canyon, about two hours south of Cody.)
Wyoming has many spring moods, ranging from howling wind to blizzard, to bluebird-blue sky and mellow. Friday was the latter, and my state had on its spring green, freckled with wildflowers and grazing pronghorn. As I drove, I watched for soaring hawks (I saw two golden eagles and three balds), counted pronghorn until 200 and then lost track, thought about geology (it’s hard to drive through Wyoming and ignore the geology, because rock layers and the structures they form are so obvious), and mused about writing and life.
Then I got to Colorado, and I-25 turned into a major traffic jam. Those final two hours of the drive were not fun. Still, Red and I made it to the Arvada Center, where I changed into my dress and sparkly sandals, and went inside to join the throng.
It was a delight to reconnect with nature writer Mary Taylor Young, childrens’ fiction and non-fiction writer Nancy Oswald, writer Carol Grever, and sociologist Eleanor Hubbard, among many others. And to share a table with poet Art Elser, and memoirist, fiction writer, and writing teacher Page Lambert and her husband John Gritts, artist and educator.
We ate, we talked writing, we listened to keynote speaker and former Rocky Mountain News sports cartoonist Drew Litton on the creative process of cartooning. And then came the awards.
I was a finalist in two categories: Blog (for this blog), and Essay (for “No Species Is An Island” in Humans and Nature). The competition was stiff, with fine writers in both (including Page in Essay), so I didn’t expect to win either. I hoped for one award–we always hope, I think. I was honored when my name was called as the winner for Blog, and then stunned when it was called again for Essay. Wow–Thank you, Colorado Authors’ League!
The next day I drove over the mountains on the familiar route between Denver and Salida, a drive Richard and I took dozens of times in our last years together as we commuted back and forth for his cancer treatments, and to care for my mom, who died the winter before Richard did.
I reached Salida just in time to rush to my first meeting of a weekend packed with meetings, teaching, and catching up with Salida friends. When I agreed to return to work with the finalists for the Kent Haruf Memorial Writing Scholarships, I imagined having time to hang out and read and write.
Not a moment! Still, it was a rewarding, if intense weekend. Especially the time working with four talented high school writers: teaching them in workshop and consulting with them individually on their work, and then selecting a Scholarship winner and another writer as Honorable Mention. (Congratulations, Berlin VanNess of Buena Vista High School and Mike White of Cañon City High School!) I also MCed the Awards Dinner…
By the time I left late yesterday afternoon, I was exhausted. And very eager to be home in Cody.
North Park and the Park Range yesterday evening
It’s a 9-plus-hour drive home, so I wisely didn’t try to do the whole thing last night. Instead, I drove to tiny Walden, in Colorado’s North Park, a sea of sagebrush rimmed by mountains that reminds me a bit of my home territory. I tucked Red into an inconspicuous spot behind at the Forest Service Work Center there, climbed into my nest inside the topper, and fell asleep to the chorus of spring peepers from a nearby pond.
My treat for getting an early start this morning was an extended stop at Split Rock National Historic Site between Rawlins and Riverton. (Split Rock is a gloriously eroded granitic dome rising above the Sweetwater River that was a landmark on the South Pass portion of the Oregon Trail.)
Spring wildflowers blooming on Split Rock
The “seams” in the nubbly granitic dome were bright with wildflowers and I happily climbed and wandered, reconnecting with plant-friends just as I had reconnected with writer friends on Friday night and Salida friends through the weekend: spring buttercups and chickweed, round-leafed saxifrage and stoneseed, Nuttall’s violets, and wax currant.
Ranunculus (buttercup) and Cerastium (chickweed)
Meadowlarks fluted their bubbling songs over the voices of sage sparrows, and tiny fence lizards hunted for insects among the rocks. It was the perfect way to recharge my batteries for the last four hours of the drive home.
I pulled Red into the garage at four pm and began to unload the truck. Inside, I found Shantel Durham, my wonderful painter, at work on the finishing touches of the new paint in the bedroom hallway. Once that hallway was a dark and uninviting corridor. Now, as Shantel said, “it’s like the sun came out.”
The newly painted bedroom hallway (I refinished that floor myself, by hand).
That pretty much sums up how I feel about my life since moving home to Cody: It’s like the sun came out. And I am very, very grateful to be here at home at last.
