H is for Happiness—a Colorado memory that never dulled

If you’ve been following my A to Z Blog Challenge posts, you might recall in E is for Education I ended with a teaser about me writing about the happiest day of my life for the letter H.  I first wrote about this topic back in 2012 and a few people might think I shouldn’t be recycling an old post for this month-long writing event. But for selfish reasons I wanted to wallow in old memories. So here it goes, my recycled post with additional text at the end….

I wish I had a better memory or I would have had the foresight to keep travel diaries when Don and I took vacations. In my defense, I never needed to keep track of the pesky details of our trips because Don could be counted on to be my living, breathing encyclopedia. If he was here right now, for example. I’d ask him if it was in Central City, Black Hawk or Cripple Creek Colorado where we found ourselves on a Halloween night with nothing but fumes in the gas tank. It was one of those little boom and bust towns high in the Rocky Mountains back in the days before they became tourist destinations. That happened more recently after the state legalizing gambling in their historic goldmine districts.

Whatever town we landed in on Halloween, back then there was only three ways to get to that town: a narrow gauge railroad, a two lane road that wound its way through horseshoe curves with a mountain on one side of the road and a deep drop off without guard rails on the other side, and a far less dangerous road going out the other side of the town. We were young and stupid back then or we never would have taken that mountain pass---especially after dark----and we never would have driven past a sign by a gas station proclaiming it was the last chance to buy fuel for x number of miles. 

Let me tell you, we were never so relieved to see a gas station in our entire lives and as far as Halloween memories go, that night and the next day created some of the best. Inside the station was a table full of popcorn balls for trick-or-treaters and when Don tried to buy one, the lady explained they had 27 kids in town and only 27 popcorn balls. ("No popcorn for Don!" as Seinfeld's soup Nazi might have said.) We had a 50 gallon auxiliary gas tank on the pickup and it took a long time to pump 49+ gallons so we were there a long while, and as we waited Don handed out popcorn balls while the proprietor took Polaroid pictures of the kids for their bulletin board. That was small town America at its very best.

Our next stop in town was to the only other business open that night---a bar inside of an old three story hotel built in the 1800s that no longer rented out rooms. It was a beautiful building with ornate carved wood everywhere and it had a staircase winding upward to a sky light framing a full moon. No amount of talking on Don’s part could get the owner to let us stay in one of those rooms upstairs but he did get us invited to stay overnight in the private home of a patron of the place. Don would have taken up the offer, I’m sure, if he’d been alone but all I could think about was the Bates Motel and getting killed by a psycho while taking a shower. No, that night it was sleeping bags under the stars for us.

The next day we spent roaming around the town, talking to the residents and soaking up the history of their heyday of gold mining. We even spent a fair among of time sitting on a huge pile of dirt at the mouth of an old mining shaft, sifting for gold that some how—we thought—had escaped the eyes of hundreds of other people in the hundred years since that mine was active. It doesn’t sound like much to tell the story but that afternoon, sitting there in our flannel shirts and jeans, the sun overhead and the smell of fall in the air was the happiest time in my life. We were young, crazy, newly in love and we didn’t have a care in the world. We were letting our imaginations run wild picturing ourselves alive and living a hundred years ago and also trying to figure out how we could buy that old hotel in town that was up for sale for ridiculously low price, especially considering what has become of that place since casino gambling gave the area another boom. Back home we'd been looking for a vintage house to restore.

People in the widowhood circles I’ve come to know all seem to name their wedding days as the happiest day of their lives. And of course, everyone else immediately understands the reference—the emotions and commitment a day like that represents. I usually don’t say anything when this topic comes up because there is no shortcut to understanding how sitting on a pile of dirt in the mountains of Colorado could be the happiest day of anyone’s life. But it’s the day I keep coming back to when I think about Don and myself starting out life together. Even when people see the gold miner’s pan filled with rocks, fool’s gold and unpolished rubies sitting on the dining room table no one could have ever guessed that it’s the equivalent of having wedding day flowers pressed between the pages of a book. They’re the souvenirs we brought back from a trip we took to heaven on earth.
Back to 2026: I didn’t change a word since I first wrote the above. Visiting that post still has the power to bring back those Zen-like hours we spend panning for gold and day-dreaming of the future we could have had, if we could have found a way to live in that area. After we got back home we did give it serious consideration but in the end we didn’t have the assets to buy that old hotel and restore it, not to mention at the time there was no way for us to make a living out there. For anyone, we thought. This area was not even in the sight-line of the deep-pocketed people, back then, who later came along with bigger dreams than we had. From all reports, they turned that dying town and the hotel into something uniquely Western and profitable. But we were always afraid to go back again because in this case, Thomas Wolfe was probably right. You can’t go “home” again. Seeing the town spit-shined and full of tourists would have destroyed the feelings of total solitude, peace and love we experienced that day.  © 

When I downsized to move to Independent Living the gold panning tin got sold and its contents ended up in this fruit jar. Note to Nieces: Be sure to move it with me if I end in Assisted Living or Memory Care.

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The Picture Purging Project

 My niece drove up from the boondocks to spend the day with me. We hadn’t seen each other since several months before the pandemic started. Her mission was to get me started on downsizing all the photos that I’ve accumulated over my lifetime and part of my parent’s lives. My goal was to end up with forty-one images to go into a 27” by 40” photo collage frame and another 100 to be digitized to become a slideshow in a digital photo frame.

My idea was that the photo collage will be an easy move if/when I ever have to get relocated out of my independent living unit on the continuum care campus to their memory care building. Those kinds of place always ask family to bring photos in. When my husband went into stroke rehab I scrambling to put together a board of photos that the therapists wanted in his room so they could try to pull language out of him. I don’t want to put that kind of stress on my nieces someday, not to mention they wouldn’t necessarily pick the same photos I would to invoke memories. Some of Don’s nieces and nephews, for example, brought in photos of their grandkids who Don hadn't seen often enough to be able to name before his stroke. Can we all spell ‘confusing’ for a guy who’d just had a massive brain bleed and 'awkward' for me having to remove them off the wall?

Anyway, photo purging with my niece was both easier and harder than purging my closet was last week. Easier because anything I was willing to let go of my niece wanted. Absolutely nothing got trashed that day. But it was harder because we kept getting side-tracked down Memory Lane and I kept forgetting what the goal was. We didn’t get anywhere near my finish line---I had a full week penciled in to complete the job---but we had fun and she went home with two 22” x 16” x 6” boxes full of photos and albums from my side of the family. She sent me a text when she got home saying she hoped I wasn’t too stressed with the purge and I wrote back, “Not at all. Downsizing to Goodwill is stressful. Downsizing to family is not because I know if I made a mistake I can turn into an Indian giver and get stuff back."

She also went home with the 25^th anniversary dress of my mom’s, a “memory jacket” of my dad’s golfing days and a like-new L.L. Bean goose down parka that she’ll give to her daughter. She also took my dad’s oak tool box, some old 1940’s linens and a couple of things to pass on to my other niece who is surprising both me and her sister by developing an interest in collectibles at the ripe old age of 50 something. She’s the niece I used to hire when I wanted someone to help me deep clean and I wanted to be talked into parting with stuff. She was ruthless with her, “Aunt Jean, you don’t need that!” She’s still a cleaning machine and does it professionally, doing two and three houses a day.

The second day of my photo purging project I was on my own and I disassembled most of my photo albums and filled a 13 gallon, tall kitchen trash bag up with photos to throw out. I also labeled four  4” x 7” x 11” photo boxes to rough sorting photos I might want to keep. Yes, I know, my idea of only ending up with 140 pictures quickly got scrapped as an impossible mission unless I got a lobotomy to cut out my sentimental side.

The third day of my project I filled up another 13 gallon trash bag. All but 5-6 pictures of our travel and trips got purged as well as all the photos from my husband’s side of the family, (except for a few ancestors that will get mailed to his brother). The travel photos I kept were from our time spent in Central City and Silverton, Colorado taken on the day I call the happiest day of my life. One of those photos will go in my jar of fool’s gold and rubies that we panned on that trip. It wasn’t a honeymoon but it sure felt like one. If we could have figured out how to make a living in Silverton we would have moved there. For months afterward we got home we tried to figure out a way to buy the Teller House Hotel that was for sale at the time. It was built in 1896 and only the bar on the first floor was still open, but we got to wander around upstairs and got an invitation to stay overnight at the bartender’s house. All I could think about was getting murdered in our sleep by a stranger who looked like Jack Nickelson so we slept in sleeping bags on bed the of our pickup truck instead---like that was somehow safer. A decade or so later casino money came in and turned the entire area into a huge tourist destination and the hotel got restored to its former glory.

Teller House

On the fourth day of my photo purging project I took all the photos I had in frames and in three photo collage boards out of their frames and started the process of figuring out what to put in my new photo collage board. It’s going to take time to complete that project because I’ll have to send many of the photos out to get resized. But it was unrealistic to think I could complete this project in a week. Duh! I’ve also rescheduled the photo frame slideshow part of the project to after I move. After researching the cost of sending them out to be digitized and putting them on a memory stick I decided it wasn't something I'm willing to pay when I can teach myself how to do it when I don’t have pressure of a moving breathing down my neck.

On the fifth & sixth days of my photo purging project I sorted through a 15” x 20” x 18” box of 35mm slides that I had taken back in the '60s. It was a box that I hauled out of my clothes closet during that purging and it had been in there so long I forgot what was in it. A month before my husband died we sorted through a similar size box of slides that he had taken, with the intentions of getting the best 100 put in a digital slideshow photo frame. We were both avid amateur photographers back in the day, me concentrating on candid shots of people, he loved landscapes and nature shots. The best of the best of his photos were tucked in the top of my box of slides and I made quick work of cutting that 100 slides down to 25. My slides---close to 1,000 I'm guessing---were a harder sort, but I did it! And I fully plan to carry that digital frame goal over the finish line and it will have to accommodate 200 images now, instead of half that. In addition to the 100 slides I kept for myself I set another 200 aside to give to my nieces since they were my favorite subject to follow around with my camera.

On the seventh day I rested to write this blog and wished a good fairy would come by to clean up the mess this week's project created. My work tables in the garage are filled with stuff to pack for Goodwill and photos that need resizing are waiting on my dining room table to get labeled to take into the photo center. Photos have a way of evoking memories that otherwise get lost in the shuffle of life and, boy, this week of photo purging sure gave me have some vivid dreams each night, making my Christmas week pass no anxiety. I had a full life, not a conventional life but it hit enough benchmarks to make me happy and with few regrets. ©

This is photo collage frame that will hang in my future laundry room.

This is what is left of my photos and slides and they all fit in my media cabinet. Before the purge I had albums that took up three feet on a bookcase, those white boxes were all full---two are empty now---I also had the four photo collage boards (up above) that hung in my garage, the box of slides and a basket full of photos that were in frames. The only photo collage I couldn't bring myself to disassemble is one of all the dogs I've had in my life. I'm thinking I can find a place to hang that one after I move. Don't judge. I never had kids. 

Climbing Mountains

I’ve never had a desire to climb anything higher than the three story rock climbing wall at the YMCA, done with a safety harness and a guy holding the rope below who tells you where to put your hands and feet. I’ve watched plenty of people do the wall as I used a treadmill across the gym but I never had the guts to sign up because I didn’t think my old hips joints could make the necessary stretches. I wish they’d had walls like that when I was a kid. Maybe I wouldn’t be afraid of heights now if they did. As a young adult in the 1960s The Empire State Building had me crab-crawling the floor of the observation deck where I had my first, full-blown panic attack and when a group of us was about to get on an elevator in the Sears Tower ten years later, which at the time was the tallest building in the world, I felt another panic attack coming and I refused to get in. So mountain climbing? No way, Jose`. Never in a 100 years. I’d probably panic at the top and stay until my bones bleached in the sun and other climbers started decorating my skeleton up like a snowman.

This week I went to a lecture at the senior hall that was presented by a local university professor who has climbed the Himalayas in India, Ben Nevis in Scotland and other mountains around the globe, and he's over half way to joining the elite mountaineers who have climbed the highest mountains on each of the seven continents. But this lecture focused on climbing Mount Kenya (17,057 feet) and Mount Kilimanjaro (19,341 feet), ancient volcanic mountains and the tallest in Africa. Someone asked him what the appeal of climbing is and at first he joked that he climbs for the views, then he said he does it for the adventure. He started rappelling down the sides of buildings at ten and climbed his first mountain at fourteen. If you watch the History or Discovery Channel you may have seen some of his recorded lectures and heard his delightful Australian accent. Craig Benjamin also lecturers on cruises sponsored by both the New York Times and Scientific American and his bio page on Wikipedia includes a long list of books and articles he’s written. He’s the real deal, an expert on ancient Central Asian history. Mountain climbing is his hobby. A fascinating hobby but I’ll stick to knitting. 

One thing I found interesting is he said climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is more like steep walking, except for the glacier on the summit which takes serious ice climbing expertise and equipment which few people do including the lecturer. And all his photographs supported the “steep walk’ observation. You aren’t climbing straight up like I envisioned but rather you’re going on spiraling paths around three volcanic cones to get to the summit. The climb didn’t look at all scary---hard but no places where you could fall off sharp cliffs. His team of six averaged around three miles a day carrying fifteen pound backpacks and they were supported by two dozen porters who carried 40 pound packs, everything from tables and chairs, tents, food and water to a canvas outhouse or as he called it, “The loo.” 

The park only allows 200 people on the mountain at any one time and the law requires they weigh everyone’s packs and inspect everyone’s boots and socks before you can go. Kilimanjaro took them 4½ days to climb up to the rapidly shrinking snow cap (global warming) and 1½ days to climb down and it costs $2,000 per person plus airfare. It’s a major source of income for the country. Another interesting fact is every day they’d climb up x-number of feet and the tour guide would make them come back down a fourth of the way to camp for the night. That got their systems acclimated to the high altitude so they were less likely to get sick from the lack of oxygen in the mountains.

I’ve been in the mountains out in Colorado and on roads so narrow we had to fold our truck mirrors in so we could hug the high side or risk falling 100s of feet below and the evidence of tragic accidents like that could be seen if you looked down. I’ve been in mountainous area where we had to use come-alongs and winches to get yourselves out of muddy mountain ruts---my husband’s idea of a fun afternoon, playing in the mud. Don loved the Rocky Mountains and he camped in them for several weeks every year for over 25 years, pretending he was a mountain man. He had a 35 mm camera with telephoto lens that could turn a speck on the horizon into a moose so close up you could count his eyelashes. He was a good photographer and judging by the hundreds of slides he’d come home with, it’s pretty safe to say one of the things he loved about The Rockies was the views. Me? I’d still like to see the view from the top of the rock climbing wall at the YMCA which is pretty funny given the fact that I gave away my six foot step ladder for fear I’d try to use it and fall to my death. And I'm pretty sure I'm still afraid of heights. ©