Winter Embraces Badboulder

I love a passage in Arnold Lobel's book Owl at Home that features Owl contentedly enjoying his pea soup and toast until winter comes rattling his door. The demented Owl invites winter inside his home and destruction follows. After becoming a famous author, Lobel admitted that his characters could be described as neurotic but that Owl in particular was "downright psychotic".

David and I have experienced a couple of winters in Badboulder that align us with Owl. We didn't issue an invitation to winter, it just blasted its way inside. We weren't adequately prepared for the invasion.

December 2010 brought us a storm that tested our efforts to keep winter outside our house. We're winning this year thanks to our pellet stove, insulation and solar gain. The antique cook stove helps in that we burn our scrap construction lumber and an accumulation of chaparral roots. Winter's beauty can be more truly appreciated when one is cozily watching from a window.

David ,the cold-hardy photographer, went wild with the camera this storm. Badboulder's snowy pictures not only capture the moment but will soothe body and soul next summer when spontaneous combustion threatens.

Day in and day out, our winters in Badboulder are much like Owl's peaceful existence. The nights range from cool to cold but the sun's warmth brings glorious days. We just sit around eating pea soup and toast.

I can start my landscaping projects in knitted hat, layered sweater and jacket, gloves and scarf. In an hour or so the boulders are strewn with discarded clothing and I work in a long sleeved cotton shirt. David strips to short sleeved tees during winter midday while working outdoors.

Two or three times each winter a true storm, such as we are currently experiencing, rages through Yarnell: wind, rain, hail, sleet and snow flood our washes and ice the roads. Winter's fury arrived December 29 and the resulting snow still graces our boulders and pathways.

Time to pour in the pellets and load the cook stove. Hope you enjoy these majestic pictures from the warmth of your own home.

FROM THE KNOTHOLE: Hello, hi, it's me, up here, and I've got the master control. You know, the remote for the TV and the Blu-ray. Maybe it's just me, but I think Robert Fulghum had it all wrong. I didn't learn everything I needed to know in kindergarten. Heck, I didn't even go to kindergarten. And look how I turned out. If you are like me, a cosmopolitan, suave dude from the last century, you learned it all at the movies, especially the drive-ins. But, that is another story. Why, this past week, and this is serious, I learned about death. The movie was Shadowlands, with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, in a true story from the life of C. S. Lewis. In this movie, we try to answer the question: Why love if losing hurts so much? When his wife dies, Lewis tells us that twice that night he was given the choice, first as a boy, and then as a man. The boy chose safety; the man chooses suffering. He reconciles the agony of death by concluding that pain now is part of the happiness. That's the deal.

a parting shot from bbman: in addition to his work on origin of the species, charles darwin spent a lot of time and effort trying to show that human emotions actually sprang from animals, saying that animals and humans act pretty much the same when besot with anger, fright, joy, etc. I think he was on to something. during this past week i have been happy as a lark, busy as a bee, hungry as a bear, crazy as a loon, proud as a peacock. well, you get the idea. you're the man, charles. Man, I must be crazy as a baboon for living here. Too hot in the summer. Too cold in the winter. More pea soup, please.

Colorado Aspens and Gooseberry Pie

We drove into Colorado heading west on US route 50 one of America's "blue highways" and continued to travel the two-lane byways. William Least Heat Moon validated the deeper connections to America made by slowing one's pace and stopping to smell the pines in his book Blue Highways, a great winter's read.

Colorado's aspen and cottonwood trees are going out in a blast of color this October--and Denver's huge variety of maples, Virginia creeper, catalpa and sumac were enchanting. I exclaimed and gasped around hundreds of winding curves as we traversed Highway 186 from Denver to Pagosa Springs. I was at the wheel when we wound our way through Wolf Creek pass, a spot of land with such spectacular views that I forgot to whine about the snow. Plowing had left the roadway clear and the falling snow was of the melting, mushy variety. Wolf Creek pass boasts a 180 degree curve reminiscent of the trip into the Alps to Tyrol, the land of my ancestors--a gift from Matt in 2000.

Killing frost hadn't touched Denver yet and all the yards were graced with beautiful blooms. A neighborhood walk was as delightful as any stroll through a botanical garden. NC harvested yummy grape tomatoes and tiny prime squash from her garden for an omelet. She also found an elusive zucchini, one of those rare giants with tender skin and flesh. All to often, a sizable zucchini is hard as a gourd with pithy flesh, but luckily this one just seemed destined for chocolate zucchini cake.

Not only did NC bake a cake to far surpass Betty Crocker and the Pillsberry Dough Boy's best effort, she also baked a gooseberry pie to perfection.

My sister and I contend that pie making skills skipped a generation and I resorted to Marie Callendar several years ago if company's acomin'. Our mom, GG, has baked thousands of pies in her day, every one of them scrumptious. Leslie and NC have the knack. We stowed a package of GG's frozen gooseberries in our ice chest and fortunately NC couldn't let them go to waste--which resulted in a flaky crusted gooseberry pie.

The baby bump is growing, GC and NC are glowing. Good they have 17 more weeks to find the perfect name.

Most of our pictures were taken through rain splotched windows which can't dim the beauty of Colorado in October.

p.s. This blog was written while waiting to depart for Missouri to help my mom, GG, through a medical crisis. After returning December 11, my own medical appointments were waiting and I'm just returning to our Badboulder blog. Skipping this one was a consideration; however, the pictures were just too good to discard. I hope you enjoy Colorado's beauty as much as we did.

FROM THE KNOTHOLE: William Allen Butler, a 19th century American lawyer and writer once observed that God could have made a better berry (than the strawberry), but doubtless God never did. Let me twist that around a little and opine that God could have make a more colorful state than Colorado, but doubtless he never did. Even the most cynical and spiritually calloused of our fellow humans could hardly drive through Colorado without becoming pie-eyed at the beauty and wonder of what God and his paint brush have created in our most colorful state. Driving through Colorado makes one grab their camera and shoot pictures through the windshield with childlike abandon. But, for most of us, the pictures never quite capture the grandeur of Colorado's sweeping panoramas. In Colorado, all of us can be forgiven if we act like Ansel Adams reincarnated. Badboulderlady was flinging that camera around like a gunfighter's 45 at the OK Corral. I was ducking and dodging to avoid head shots. In the end, what you bring home from Colorado is an indelible image imprinted somewhere deep inside the mind's eye.

a parting shot from bbman: civilized man, i.e., intellectual man vs. the rough man. people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. those words are often attributed to george orwell, but no where in his works can they be found. but, here is what he did say in an essay on rudyard kipling: kipling sees clearly that men can only be civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them. and, on another occasion, orwell said, those who abjure violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.