weather near the Spanish Peaks
Last evening it started pouring rain around 6:15 pm and didn’t stop. Then the hail started falling on our steel roof and scared the cat. Half-inch diameter hail started pelting us with a vengence!
What’s not to love about this lifestyle?
The fog just engulfed our hilltop. I’m listening to The Poozies, another incredible group of musicians introduced to me by our first friend here, Bob the landlord. If you love Irish and Scottish music, you will love them! I’m baking banana bread while I write this.
Cloudy with occasional glimpses of the mountains!
So what’s not to love about this lifestyle?
The past few days have been wonderful for me. At our writing group on Saturday I met a new member who made my day! She’s been a major player in the Aspen arts scene for the past forty years, but burned out on that and is ready for something completely different. She warned me about telling too many about this beautiful place, so keep this under wraps, OK?
I have also found an exercise class I like for “older women.” It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for, so I bought a membership at Two Peaks Fitness. After winter and my post-construction slump, I need to get moving NOW! I hike up the hill behind us a few times a week and explore my new neighborhood. At 7,000 feet hiking is quite different than our old neighborhood in Fort Collins. Slowly but surely….
I am finding so many friendly people lately, especially in La Veta, and I’m finally feeling some sense of belonging here. Such a nice feeling!
And then there is my home life. This photo is a good summary.
Everyone’s happy and getting along here!
I am filled with gratitude that I can now live like this forever. Please go learn more about our move from Fort Collins to here in my new memoir!
“Our deepest human longing is for BE-longing; for belonging to our true selves, for belonging to all others…belonging to the whole universe…and belonging to that unfathomable mystery …” GRATITUDE with BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST
Best of Boomer Blogs – May Day Edition
I love to remember May Day when I was a kid. We lived in a small town in Iowa where kids made simple paper May baskets, filled them with flowers, and then hung them on our neighbor’s front doors. 
What FUN! Then at school we would do the Maypole dance. Such great spring singing programs! Remember “Spring is busting out all over!?”
Unfortunately the weather is NOT cooperating here today. We are stuck in our second four day snowstorm in TWO WEEKS in southern Colorado. The good news? Over 4 inches of moisture in April! That’s my rain gauge out there…
Luckily we have a few great blog posts from some great boomer bloggers to entertain us today! First up is Carol Cassara:
Visibility seems to be EVERYTHING in today’s intrusive social media environment–and some of the most awful influences on kids and grandkids are way too visible. Carol’s asking what you think parents (and grandparents) can do to combat the influence of negative role models in social media? At the same time, she’s lucky enough to have a nephew who appreciates the wisdom of age.
Meryl Baer of Six Decades and Counting says the pharmaceutical industry is dear to the hearts of most Americans. We buy lots of drugs, but the industry wants us to buy more. Advertisements ply us with information about all kinds of maladies and the pills that will cure them. Meryl spends too much time listening to ads, as she explains in her post: On Becoming a Hypochondriac.
Tom Sightings says, they’ve been talking about it for a few years now, ever since the last of their children left home. It’s a crossroads most of us must face as we retire. So navigate over to “Guess What We’re Doing?” to find out what he’s talking about — and what they’re doing.
Over at The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide, Rita R. Robison, consumer journalist, writes about a new study that found working longer can extend your life. Researchers found that healthy adults who retired one year past age 65 had an 11 percent lower risk of death from all causes, even when taking into account demographic, lifestyle, and health issues.
Too bad so many us do have health issues which prevent us from working longer, or chronic unemployment. It’s also very sad thousands of midlife Americans are committing suicide at an alarming rate.
Why we love snowstorms in Colorado!
We’ve been sitting in a snowstorm here at 7,000 feet in southern Colorado for the past four days. I loved it! I wrote about this and it seemed like everyone responded with, “That sounds horrible to me!”
This is exactly how horrible it is. When the snow clears and the Sangre de Cristo peaks emerge from the clouds, we are surrounded by incredible beauty. This is our view to the south today.
This is our view to the west as Mount Mestas emerges from the storm.
Besides the stunning views following a storm, we have now received two and a half inches of precipitation, about one-sixth of our total annual rainfall, leading to fields of spring flowers like Indian paintbrush, lupines, penstemon, or these lovely wild iris:
I took these photos last June, west of here in a high mountain meadow. The same can be said of the photo in the header of this blog, an amazing spread of spring flowers which only appear when we get some hardy spring snowstorms!
In conclusion: If you want the rainbow, you must have the rain…
OMG! It’s an April BLIZZARD!
The view outside our home Saturday morning…
WOW! I woke up this morning to an honest-to-goodness blizzard around our house in southern Colorado! Fog, blowing snow and very little visibility here today. So glad we were warned, because I’m not sure we could get out even if we wanted to!
It started last night with an amazing thunderstorm around 8pm. Storms are exciting up here because we are at 7,000 feet, and pretty exposed to the elements. We had torrential rains for around an hour before it switched to big clumps of snowflakes.
This morning I had 1.4 inches of precipitation in my rain gauge, and I’m afraid most of the snow blew away over the top! I don’t even know what to estimate the depth of the snow at this morning. It has blown everywhere, and it’s too damn cold to hang out outside right now to measure.
Our view as of Monday morning…more snow on the way!!!
Whenever things like this happen I always think about the early inhabitants of this area who had no weather reports or any real warnings, no grocery stores and primitive sources of heat, transportation and communication. All they could do is hunker down and hope it passes soon.
If you have any interest, the book The Children’s Blizzard is a well-researched and written account of such a blizzard in 1888, that killed a number of immigrant children when a blizzard arrived suddenly and with no warning.
What’s not to like about living in Walsenburg and rural southern Colorado
Don’t get me wrong, there are a number of negatives in moving from a city to a rural area, so much so that I often wondered why we did it after we moved here in June 2014.
(Postscript July 2018: I forgot to mention wildfires that burn up half the county!)
We first rented a 100-year-old home in Walsenburg, while building our rural home. At the time, this was the only decent rental available in the whole area! Yes, during that first year I had many doubts about whether this area was the best choice for me.
Driving through Walsenburg, you will see a sad little town that has certainly seen better days. To quote the city of Walsenburg page:
“Incorporated on June 16, 1873, Walsenburg was the first statutory city and seventh incorporated municipality in the Territory of Colorado. Walsenburg, an irregular plateau broken by numerous narrow fertile valleys in the east, rising to the Culebra Range of the Sangre de Cristo in the west and the Spanish Peaks in the south. Elevation is 6,126 feet. Average annual precipitation is 15.8 inches. 300+ days of sunshine.”
The town enjoyed its highest population numbers (around 5,000 souls) in the 1930s through the 60s when coal mining was king. It now has fallen below 3,000. We do have two grocery stores, a few motels, three fast food places, and a few good restaurants. Two highlights are the La Plaza Inn, built in 1907, and the historic Fox Movie Theater.
In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t worried so much about enjoying my new life here. Sure it is inconvenient to have to drive to larger towns for certain things and some medical care, but the real point is that living here is good for my health. It took a while, but I eventually understood the subtle and not so subtle effects of stress on my body, spirit, and mind. It was only after living without city stress for a while, that I saw what a toll it was taking on me. Only in this quiet, natural setting have I learned to be present with this moment, a goal I have held for years.
It’s true I didn’t enjoy living in Walsenburg. I found the town depressing. But now that we live in the foothills west of there, I like going into town. It no longer bums me out. I just needed to realize that we have traded the many conveniences of living in a city for incredible natural beauty and glorious silence in a world with so little of that.
When I consider the negatives of where we live now, the worst is the terrible wind storms we can have, with fine dust blowing everywhere. This is a semi-arid climate so it dries out everything including your skin.
I’m a newcomer to rural southern Colorado. After two years I decided to compile a short journal about the ups and downs of moving from a good-sized city to rural America to build a passive solar retirement home in the foothills: 
Adventures of the NEW??? Old Farts 