sustainable living
Capulin Volcano in Northern New Mexico
On a stunningly beautiful March day, with temperatures in the 70s, we decided to take a short drive down to Raton and points east yesterday.
Twenty miles east of Raton you will find Capulin Volcano National Monument. This volcano erupted into existence 60,000 years ago. Capulin’s conical form rises 1,300 feet above the plains and reaches 8,180 feet above sea level. A curvy paved road takes you up to the top where you can look down into a caldera or volcanic crater.
The best part? The incredible views looking west! If you look carefully you will see the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in the distance. Those are the mountains we see from our patio west of Walsenburg.
Check out Mount Capulin sometime and learn more about how volcanos form.
Midlife: The BEST time to Remodel Your Life!
I had an interesting exchange this week with The HerStory Project, a website requesting pitches from women who are experiencing “the realities of getting older” and offering support to Gen X women in midlife. They also requested informational pieces so I offered to write a piece about what midlife is, why it is particularly important to us today, and its psychological impact and implications. I thought they would benefit from the older perspective, a scholar and therapist who has done extensive research on this topic. They weren’t interested… What could this older woman know about midlife mayhem and personal change? My response: Learn from those who have gone before you!
Here’s a piece I wrote four years ago on this topic, in the midst of remodeling our suburban home in preparation for our move south to build passive solar.
Find this piece and many others in my Memoir of Retirement: From Suburbia to Solar in Southern Colorado…
Remodeling and Menopause, April 20, 2014
I have had three conversations in the past three days with midlife women who are remodeling their homes, and that includes me! What is it about menopause and remodeling? I, of course, have my own theories on this…
Midlife means time to change, and what better place to begin than changing something in your immediate surroundings?
My divorce at age 49 stimulated all sorts of major changes for me, mostly because I had to move into a much smaller and older home. OK, let’s just call it dumpy. My saving grace after my divorce was slowly fixing up my home bit by bit as I could afford it. I started with small improvements like a new native plants garden, a solar tube for more natural lighting and carpeting…
and ended up turning a nasty old south-facing screened-in porch…
into a lovely new sun room. I added square footage to my home while also bringing down my heating bills… Such a deal!
More importantly, my new sun room was just the thing for improving my mental health. The whole experience made me feel happy, productive and creative, plus it showed me I had the power to build a much more positive future for myself. My new sun room made me say: “Look how you took an ugly space and turned it into a thing of beauty!”
BEAUTY IS THE GARDEN WHERE HOPE GROWS!
You could find me there every morning surrounded by my many blooming succulents with my sheltie dogs by my side, journaling and reading fun and empowering books about creativity and midlife change as I considered what was next for me.
That beautiful, quiet space became a source of great courage and creativity. It became the perfect place to plan my new life! I felt so safe and secure ensconced in that solid new room created especially for me, by me.
Ten years later I can see how important that physical change was to my overall perspective. I see now how the choices I made back then increased my confidence, while enhancing my power to change everything else in my life.
Remodeling and solar power taught me how to dream again, eventually leading to meeting a great man who shared my dreams, and building our beautiful passive solar home in rural southern Colorado!
Never underestimate the power of a midlife attitude adjustment to change EVERYTHING!
Why we decided to stay in Colorado for retirement
Another short entry from my Memoir of Retirement: From Suburbia to Solar in Southern Colorado.
Amazing sunrise from our new passive solar rural home in southern Colorado
I wrote this on May 7th 2014:
Many of you may be like us, making some big decisions about where and when to retire. We just signed a contract yesterday to sell our home in Fort Collins, and move south in the next month or so.
When we started thinking about this major change, we chose to remain in Colorado for a number of reasons.
We were looking for inexpensive land to build a solar home with great views and a cleaner, quieter, calmer existence. We found that in the rural southern part of our state.
Then I just found out this week that in terms of medical care and finances we made a very good choice!
First of all, Colorado ranks in the top quartile in healthcare systems nationally, beating out all other western states. Then I saw a new Bankrate.com financial survey announcing the best states to retire to. Colorado ranks number two, only after South Dakota.
Here’s a quote from that article: “Colorado gets above-average marks for cost of living, crime rate, health care quality and taxes. The Gallup-Healthways survey finds that the well-being of Colorado residents ranks among the highest in the nation.”
The first thing you need to know about Colorado is how different parts of the state really are. Most Coloradans live in what we call “the front range” cities like Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs. Then there are the mountains which are beautiful, but cold, snowy and generally an expensive place to live.
I have spent most of my life living in Colorado Springs, Boulder and Fort Collins, and to my mind, a city is a city in terms of their ever increasing cost of living, overcrowding, traffic, pollution and quality of life. After living the past nineteen years in the Fort Collins area, I can say these are our worst problems, and they are not going to get any better ever.
Mike is ecstatic to move out of the city and have this view everyday!
The rest of the state is rural and quite different than “the front range.” The eastern plains are mainly small farming communities and the mountains have few good job opportunities. We have chosen to put down new roots in a rural area west of Interstate 25. We have found the perfect perch for our custom, passive solar home.
Postscript: I would only add that the average household income for some place like Fort Collins is near $60,000 now, while the average down here in Huerfano County is around $33,000. Colorado exhibits quite a wide range of income levels. You don’t need to be rich to live here, only in the big cities like Denver, Fort Collins, etc.
The hidden purpose of my new memoir: Convincing your pardner to love rural!
I decided to write a memoir of the process Mike and I went through around age 60, as we were going through it. I thought, we can’t be the only ones thinking about leaving city life behind for retirement, hoping to find a quiet, peaceful sustainable life in some beautiful rural area.
Horsetooth Reservoir up above Fort Collins, Colorado!
As we put this plan into action and bought three acres west of Walsenburg to build our passive solar home at the beginning of 2014, I discovered that Mike was MUCH MORE CERTAIN than I was about this whole plan! He felt certain that he wanted to leave the city behind regardless of our old friendships back in Fort Collins, and the services and predictability of city life. This plan was suddenly coming together far faster than I could assimilate! I knew I loved visiting down south, but was I ready to give up everything I knew to move there?
Walsenburg rental we lived in while building our home west of here
After we moved into our rental for the building process, I learned that many wives felt the same way initially about pulling up their roots and going completely rural. The men seemed to know what they wanted, but the women were more careful or hesitant to move to a rural area. Much like I felt at first that our new homestead was rather “isolated” other women I met felt the same. Luckily I totally trusted Mike’s sense of place and his unique abilities to make this home the best of my entire life.
But I just realized yesterday that my memoir is especially suited for wives or partners who want to move somewhere wild and rural, to show them the process I went through. I certainly changed my mind as the building went on…
At first I was so scared and uncertain of this choice we were making, mainly because we needed to sell our suburban home to afford the construction of our new solar home. There was really no way to go back on this deal if I ended up not liking it! It did feel really risky to me, but not to Mike.
Our new home at sunrise!
I found that very quickly after we moved into our new home about one year after moving to Walsenburg, I loved it here. The silence, the natural beauty, the amazing sunrises and the big sky feeling… what’s not to love about that?
It just took me a while to adjust my vision and expectations and QUIT WORRYING SO MUCH ABOUT EVERYTHING!
So, for any of you who want to convince your pardner to move to a more rural part of the country. This book might really help!
Why we moved to the country to retire
For some reason this spring I keep flashing back to four years ago when we were still living in suburbia in Fort Collins and preparing to move down here to build our solar home…
Here’s an excerpt from my Memoir of Retirement:
I saw a stupid retirement TV commercial last night that really got me thinking. The question was:
Can you keep your lifestyle in retirement?
Say what? It suddenly struck me that this may be the most important difference between those of us facing retirement in the next few years. I for one have NO intention of keeping this lifestyle. If we did, what would be the point of retirement?
My dream retirement involves escaping this lifestyle! I feel that I have become ‘metro-fied,’ and I’m now more than ready for a peaceful escape from my present lifestyle.
I have lived in metropolitan areas for most of my adult life, for access to good jobs. What I have observed is ever increasing crowding, pollution, traffic and aggressive behavior.
Construction begins on our new solar home facing the Spanish Peaks!
What I now long for is a quieter more peaceful existence with just a few people per square mile, where we can enjoy a friendly, caring sense of community; a place where we can make new friends through our daily lives.
We know and accept that this will involve a major lifestyle change, and we are ready for that. No traffic sounds great to us in exchange for less shopping convenience. Valuing and having time for new relationships is what we seek, not more of the same overcrowding, air pollution and road rage.
As I sit in the constant traffic in Fort Collins or Denver these days, I can only think, “This is never going to get better!” People will continue moving here and traffic will keep increasing every year, and I do not want to spend one more precious moment of my life sitting in traffic.
We want out of this lifestyle, the sooner the better!
Postscript four years later: I WAS SO RIGHT ABOUT THIS!
Adventures of the NEW??? Old Farts 