speaking the truth

[ Loiosh, an orange tabby wearing a green harness, is seen from above, standing on a couple of boulders; he’s sniffing at a clump of mostly-brown grass to his left. Beyond him are the dark, turbid waters of the Arkansas River. ]

I was … pretty okay with this.

[ Loiosh’s hindpaws are still on the same rock, but he’s stretched his front half out, nearly over the water, forepaws on another rock, to try to reach a particular blade of grass. His head is tucked under a tuft of grass, and he’s straddling his leash, which runs directly upwards toward the camera. ]

I WAS MUCH LESS OKAY WITH THIS PLEASE DO NOT FALL INTO THE RIVER

IT DOES THIS

[ A view across the river. The riverbed has been built up between narrowed banks so that a standing wave rushes over an arch in the bed, then crashes down into breaking seafoam. ]

I’d spent half the ride up on the phone with my mom, & we were talking about the surfing wave in the Arkansas in Salida; I’d planned to take pictures of it on my last trip, but then there was accidentally the fiber festival, & I plain forgot.

[ A closer view of the upper part of the standing wave — the surface of the river is smoothly rippled as it runs down into the turbulent foam beneath. ]

There wasn’t anyone on it that day — there might’ve been, earlier, when there was some sun on it, but even in a wetsuit, there’s limits.

[ A closer view of the surf below the standing wave. The water flows under the the leading edge of the foam, which is whitest and wildest at that boundary, then slowly calms over the next twenty or thirty feet until it’s back to the usual smooth flow of the river. ]

I could watch people surfing there for hours — far longer than Loiosh has the patience for. Eventually he wants to go find some grass. Or, in this case, some more grass, ideally some that wouldn’t get him grumbled at for trying to fall in the river.

originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!

[ A beat up, weathered blue popup is set up on the side of Alamosa’s Main Street. One back corner is tied to the van’s tow hitch. A table sits in the back left corner, covered with a purple and white Mexican blanket. At the front is my portable workbench, with a folding camp chair sitting behind it. ]

Jasper put a link to the show on the household discord … August 29th? I think? & the application was due September 4th. So I spent that weekend putting together a couple more faery home decor pieces & then filling out the application, of which the hardest part was, of course, the prices.

I managed that a whole day ahead of time, & then realized that I had very little idea of 1) how to DO an art show, & also 2) how this particular one was run.

Turns out it was much closer to a craft show than a gallery show, which makes sense, given that I could choose to set up a popup with my stuff. Which I did, & then asked if I could bring MORE stuff, & upon hearing that I could, decided I was just gonna bring ALL the jewelry.

… all my jewelry display stuff is in the storage unit.

So I set out, two days before the show, to remedy this, with a budget of zero dollars & zero cents. I asked the Blessed Tommaso, He Who Built Eisental Camp An Entire Kitchen On A Budget Of Zero That One Pennsic, to put in a good word for me with the Gods of I Wonder What I Can Find In This Pile Of Junk, & set about wandering around the yard to see what might be useful.

Turns out we had a couple old fridge shelves, the grid kind. Also some metal grid shelving. & I have card stock & Inkscape & am not afraid to use either.

[ A selection of metal grids, often used as fridge shelves, hang from a popup tent; each is covered with white or purple cardstock cards, each of which holds a pendant or a pair of earrings. Many of them hang at odd angles. ]

& then I attacked the stack of plywood with the circular saw, attacked the pile of old roof tarp with a pair of scissors, & joined the two with the first roll of duct tape my eyes fell upon.

[ A hunk of plywood, about two by four feet, hangs from the top of the popup wall. It’s covered in beat-up, formerly-white tarp, which has been attached with neon green duct tape. Eight faery home decor pieces hang from it. Another, similar piece, sits on the ground, leaning against the popup leg; it’s filled with earrings and pendulums. ]

Then I spent NINE THOUSAND YEARS punching holes in each of the cards, writing prices & names on em, then attaching jewelry. At one point I couldn’t find the hatpin I use to make earring holes, & almost had an entire meltdown over it, but I did my deep breathing & they turned up.

It all looks EXTREMELY JANKY & I LOVE IT.

THEN I stuck CJ’s popup in the van, along with the two plastic buckets me & Jasper used to make pell bases cos they’re heavy, & then me & Jasper & Loiosh drove into town.

It was, thank the weather deities, not windy. Loiosh was feeling VERY froggy & pinned me in my chair for a while halfway through setup, for the sole & express purpose of purring vigorously at me, but that wasn’t actually a problem, because Jasper was still busy getting all the faery home decor stuff, the necklaces, & maybe half the pendulums arranged on the plywood, then tacking them all down. I hadn’t wanted to do that at home, because I didn’t want to transport them that way, but then I was too tired to take everything back off at the end of the day so my entire jewelry inventory is still sitting in the van, hanging from hunks of plywood & metal grid things.

I’d stuck my jewelry workbag & the basket with spare wire & stuff in the van, too (my portable workbench & camp chair live there) because one of the questions on the application was ‘are you willing to demonstrate your work’ & my answer to that is HELL YEAH I WILL. I even found a nice hunk of rusty steel wire while we were getting set up, which wound up getting used in the piece I got mostly done over the course of the day.

[ My beat-up old workbench; it’s made from pallet wood. On it is an old mouse pad covered with blue fabric, various pieces of metal, a couple jewelry tools, and a small, flat jewelry anvil with a spiral piece of copper sitting on it. ]

I sat there & worked on stuff for a while, Loiosh nommed on gooshyfud & collected a lot of love from passersby, Jasper took a couple packed orders to the post office. After a while I had to move my work setup to the other side of the tent to get out of the sun. Loiosh took a nap, then woke up & was wiggly, so I stuffed him in the stroller & took him for a walk. Did you know Salida has a circus? I did not know this! Loiosh flopped in their booth for a good twenty minutes & was the happiest cat in the world. We stopped in at Milagros to grab a mixed berry smoothie & some ice & then headed back to the booth, where I ALMOST had the thing I was working on finished up when it was time to tear down. (The rest took about six minutes Monday morning.)

[ A faery home decor piece hangs against a white background; it’s roughly triangular, point down, the top of the triangle curved upward. The spiral wire from the last image is part of it, along with a number of silver-colored and purple beads. ]

Tearing down took, like, fifteen minutes, which I LOVE, because everything was just hanging on boardlike objects which could just be stuck directly in the van. I wish I could do this with the soap!

& then I drove home & went basically immediately to bed.

originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!

[ A tall photo, the very tops of still-leafless trees at the bottom; then blue sky, shading up from pale behind the last twigs to deepest cerulean at the top. ]

The sky was that blue, the whole walk, up until the very end, when the sun settled down behind a band of clouds in the west.

I find cottonwood bark fascinating, especially when compared to ponderosa bark; both are somewhat fire resistant, but where ponderosa bark grows thick with overlapping ‘puzzle pieces’, cottonwood bark develops deep fissures, dividing it almost down to the growing wood. I think each bark section in the picture below is a good two inches thick. Apparently the bark is good for carving, which I’m vaguely tempted to try one of these days.

[ The edge of a cut cottonwood log, with deeply fissured bark. ]

Further down on the same log — mushrooms!

[ A collection of shelf mushrooms growing on the old wood; each is somewhat fuzzy, a variety of colors from white to tan; the top and largest is rimmed in brown. ]

I spent a bunch of time walking along the riverbanks, & some just sitting, listening to the sound of the water. I do prefer the Land of Dry to the Land of Wet, but where we’re living is, honestly, too dry for me; I need SOME running water. I’m glad the river isn’t too far away.

[ Several boulders lurk under the slightly clouded water; one, towards the back of the shot, stands clear, big enough to stand on if I could reach it. The sun glints off the running water in several places, scattered in the slight rapids over the rocks, then a near-solid band of it beyond them. ]

& a welcome sign that spring really is coming:

[ A small bunch of dry, dead grass, but from the center of it, new green growth is visible, pushing its way into the light. ]

originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!

[ Loiosh, an orange tabby wearing a green harness with a blue bow tie, is sitting in his blue cat stroller. He and the stroller are both facing to the right; his ears are perked forward. Behind him is the remains of a beautiful Colorado sunset; otherwise it’s getting pretty dark out. ]

Jasper, as always, traveled to OVFF, & as always I had to pick his ass up in Denver afterwards. I’d planned a bunch of errands on the way up, adding extra time to the trip to account for this, & when everything actually went as planned (I know, whaaaaaat) I wound up with about a half hour to kill, just around sunset.

I was in Denver. There was a park two blocks away. That’s just how it goes, in Colorado.

[ Loiosh is still in the stroller, looking more-or-less at the camera now. ]

My boy was perfectly pleased to be decanted from the van into the stroller, covered with my flannel, & wheeled along to the lakeshore trail. I was less pleased; it was COLD, & even with my vest I was cold, & I really wanted my flannel, but Loiosh is old & creaky & you know how THAT goes.

Fortunately for all Loiosh got bored pretty soon.

[ Loiosh, halfway through the process of climbing down from the stroller. One paw’s balanced on the edge, and my flannel is sliding off his hinder parts. ]

I stepped on his leash just long enough to fling my vest off, fling my flannel on, fling the vest back on over it, and shove my hands into my armpits before it was time to follow Loiosh. Who, other than a brief pause to not actually eat grass …

[ Loiosh is standing on a sparsely graveled path, next to a narrow stretch of mostly-frozen grass. Behind him is taller, winter-dry brown grass. with a few houses in the background. Loiosh is intently staring off to the right. ]

… trot trotted the whole way back to the van, & all I had to do was follow him.

[ In the extreme foreground is the front of the stroller; most of the rest of the photo is a very nice concrete path leading off towards a clump of trees in the background. Loiosh, trailing a length of rope, is a few feet ahead off the stroller and to the right, busily trotting along. ]

It was a lovely little break, the perfect spot to stretch my legs, just long enough for the hot chocolate I’d bought to reach a drinkable temperature. & enough exercise for the boy that he slept all through me rearranging stuff in the van before it was time to head to Arrivals. It’s a nice park; I wouldn’t mind living nearby.

originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!

[ In the very foreground, a strip of road; past that, mostly-snowed-over fields rising slowly to the very base of a range of mountains that rises sharply to tall, triangular peaks. No foothills here. ]

The great thing about living in Colorado is the mountains.

I first fell in love with mountains — real mountains, nothing against the ancient Appalachians, but I need young mountains — in 1988, in Zürich, staring in awe at the Alps rising to the south; in Vaduz, just to the east, in their midst. In Oberammergau, at their very edge, before descending to the plains on the road to Munich.

I first fell in love with mountains — real mountains, sharp peaks still snow-covered, serrated & silhouetted dark against a ridiculously blue sky — in 1994, in Jackson Hole, staring in awe at the Tetons all around, remembering mountains I’d carefully forgotten. In Idaho, in a sharp valley in the Sawtooth Range, the sun only visible for a few hours around noon, though the light lingered until near midnight. I tried to remember them. I wanted to remember them.

I first fell in love with mountains — having forgotten, again, for more than a decade — in 2005, above Denver, circling over the mountains on approach to the airport. In Longmont, staring in awe at Long’s Peak & Mount Meeker dominating the horizon to the west. In Rocky Mountain National Park, twelve hundred feet high already, staring at the Never Summers looming further west.

& then, as every time, I went ‘home’, back to humid, polluted, overcrowded Urbia Suburbia, otherwise known as eastern Pennsylvania, until I finally did the best thing I’ve ever done for myself, shoved everything I owned into a cargo container & into my lil car, & drove west.

The moment I saw mountains again, halfway across Colorado’s broad eastern plains, I had to pull over to cry.

I haven’t forgotten, not since that day.

[ This time the road stretches from the bottom right of the photo, off into the distance and around a wooded curve. To the left, snowy hills rise up to a serrated line of snowy peaks. ]

I spent four glorious, heartbreaking years in Colorado, healing, remembering how to breathe (not only metaphorically; turns out living in a steel town, in a house with a toxic waste dump for a basement, is … not good for lungs?), learning who I was. Who I am. Until someone I’d loved betrayed me, & I had to leave again.

I was away for three or four years, I don’t remember which, back in Appalachia, beautiful & ancient but never, ever quite high enough. & then finally I found my way back to my mountains. I could breathe again.

& then, because life goes in spirals, or at least mine does, I had to leave again. This time for New Mexico, which at least had some mountains, I could get up over ten thousand feet at Sandia Crest, & it was more than nothing. It was, at least, blessedly dry, blessedly uncrowded.

But it wasn’t right, & I missed my mountains.

After ANOTHER three years away, on a trip to Colorado for the first time in far too long, I caught my first sight of mountains, pulled over, burst into tears, & swore, ‘the next time I move to Colorado, I’M NOT LEAVING AGAIN’.

It wasn’t the cluebat that hit me. It was a great big gong, which also happened to be saying ‘oath accepted’.

In the words of kids these days … welp.

[ The road runs from lower left to upper right; an old wooden building anchors the very center of the shot. To the right, a bank of clouds with white peaks just visible; to the left, lower, more rounded mountains, with two high, sharp, snow-white peaks beyond them. ]

Which took yet another two years & a truly appalling amount of work. & even with that, it all happened faster than I could be ready for; but by the time we had to leave, I’d built Tyrava, I owned five acres of land, & most importantly, I wasn’t doing it all alone.

I live in Colorado again. WE live in Colorado. We see the mountains most every day — & when we don’t, it’s because there’s clouds (or dust) in the way. I’ve gotten past having the breath knocked out of me every time I see them — mostly — but I never get used to them.

[ Most of this shot is the road, a pair of headlights faint in the distance, light trails of windblown snow trailing across it. The road disappears into cloud and more snow in the distance, but much closer, at the very top of the shot, there’s still blue sky. ]

I hope I never do.

originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!