Road Report: Awards and Teaching


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. 

Spring Garden Discoveries & A Brag

One of the delights of buying an older house is discovering the surprises planted by previous owners. Like the daffodils, grape hyacinth (the purple flower clusters) and columbine leaves in the photo above, in a flower border now overtaken by lawn. 

I'd guess from the yard's unkempt and overgrown character that no one has done any actual gardening, or pruning, or tending anything except the lawn in this yard for a very long time. Perhaps many decades. And even the lawn isn't in great shape. 

Which means I have the delight of coming to know what may be the original mid-century modern garden plan, much like the way I am coming to know the original mid-century modern house, also neglected for a very long time.

And just as the original details of the house charmed me when I first toured it–Who could not love the vintage kitchen in the photo above, even if it was covered with grime and bad paint?–I am finding the vintage plants appearing in the yard a delight. 

Like the daffodils, grape hyacinth and columbine in the photo at the top of the post.

Or these English irises, which have been untended for so long that their rhizomes have grown into a densely packed mound in the front yard. I spent a couple of hours yesterday cleaning up and starting to weed around them.

This fall I'll carefully dig up and divide the rhizomes, and will likely end up with enough to fill an iris bed about three times the size of this one. Which is fine with me; I'd rather have irises than boring lawn any day!

The shrub above, which I think is an old-fashioned variety of flowering quince, and has been languishing in the shade of a large and sickly honey-locust tree that my arborist removed last month. Now that the shrub is getting sun, I expect it will put on quite a flower-show next spring. 

 

The peony leaves sprouting from a grass-infested triangle by the driveway. I had been contemplating planting a peony bed this fall; now I will, since they're already part of the yard flora. (The red pigment coloring these baby leaves protects their delicate inner cells from both the intense high-elevation sunlight and the cold temperatures that come with spring in the Rocky Mountains, like today's four inches of snow.)

The rhubarb I discovered the other morning when I was surveying the narrow yard off the kitchen as my prospective edible garden. I had ordered rhubarb to plant with asparagus and raspberries, so I was thrilled to find one already in situ–the more the better. 

Yup. Those tiny, tightly crinkled leaves are rhubarb.

Many of these plants are what I call "heritage" garden plants, the kind carried from place to place and traded from gardener to gardener, their roots/tubers/bulbs wrapped in damp cloth to keep them alive. Many are long-lived; individual peony and rhubarb plants, for example, may thrive for a century or more.

The happy surprise of them emerging in my neglected yard is no doubt why my mom's been on my mind more than usual. Mom was my plant-love-companion and garden inspiration: she could grow anything from ornamentals to edibles, as well as wildflowers and other native plants. 

These particular plants are all old friends, familiar from the gardens Mom tended in the house where I grew up. Same with the lilacs and bush honeysuckle that dominate this yard's overgrown hedges. She would have loved the wild chokecherries threading through them too, gifts of visiting birds. 

Mom (Joan Tweit) in the middle between Dad (on the right) and Richard (Cabe) on the left, on a visit to Betty Ford Alpine Gardens in Vail. I must have done a booksigning there, because Richard is holding a box of my books. 

Finding these plants is like having Mom with me, cheering me on as I work to restore both yard and house. (Mom died in 2011, the same year as Richard; April 3rd would have been her 86th birthday.)

It feels like this place was just waiting for me to come home and adopt it. I'm so grateful I could and did. 

****

The brag? This week I learned that I'm a finalist for the 2017 Colorado Authors League Awards in not one, but two categories: Essay and Blog. 

It's an honor to be a finalist for these awards juried by professional writers. In my two decades of living in Colorado, I won three CAL Awards; whether or not I win this time, being a finalist is an especially sweet coda to my time in the state. 

Keep your fingers crossed for me. The Awards Banquet is May 5th, and I'll be there for one last celebration of award-worthy writing with my CAL friends and colleagues.