I Woke up in Leadville

In the same way that scents can whip us instantly out of the present and into the realm of memory, I woke up this morning beamed back to my childhood by mother nature.

We are in day eight of a major snowstorm in Portland. We're usually lucky to get a day or two of flakes that stick for an hour or more. This year, apparently, the universe saw fit to dump us with a good foot and a half of snow plus a half-inch layer of frozen rain for good measure. And it's still coming down. In the twenty years I've been an Oregonian, I have never seen a storm like this one.

But there was plenty of snow in my early childhood. When I was five, my father's job transferred him to Denver, Colorado from our home in sunny Southern California. We spent some wonderful years there, some of the most memorable of my childhood. We lived there during the blizzard of 1983: we got three and a half feet of snow on Christmas Eve, and the drifts made the six foot tall fences in our backyard disappear completely. Our boisterous golden retriever, Ginger, couldn't go outside because she would run full speed right over the drifts and into the neighbor's yards. My dad helped my brothers and I dig tunnels through the backyard into a central snow cave while my mom watched nervously from the kitchen. She was so convinced once that my older brother had been buried in a snow cave that she ran out of the house screaming, jumped on the pile of snow, and started digging with her bare hands. She ruined J.s snuggly little cave and nearly gave herself frostbite. Here you'll see his cold little legs dangling from a similar snow venture:



My greatest memories of that era in our family's life were our semi-annual trips through the Continental Divide to Leadville, a tiny mining town just up the mountain from Aspen. That's where I woke up this morning when I looked out the window. I swear I could feel the ache in my chest from the elevation sickness that lasted for days as our bodies acclimated to the 2 miles above sea level (Leadville boasts being the highest incorporated town in the United States). I closed my eyes and for a just a minute, I fully expected my hear my brothers bounding down the spiral staircase of my Uncle's vintage house in Leadville, to smell the hot chocolate from the kitchen. I expected my dad's sing-song voice: "It's time to get up, it's time to get up, it's time to get up in the mooooorniiiiing!"

And then I opened my eyes, and my chest really did ache. This was the ache not of elevation, but of grief. My memories of Leadville are all wrapped up in memories of my father.

From the bedroom where I slept with my brothers, I could look out the window and see the hundred year old Catholic church across the street. Next door to us lived two old nuns and the largest cat I had ever seen in my young life--to this day, I swear I haven't seen a cat that large since (yeah, i know: see the below post on disillusionment). We went sledding on the hills in town and heeded warnings to avoid old mining shafts. In the autumn, if we were lucky enough to visit before the first snowfall, we would tolerate my father taking us into the forest and taking our portraits nestled among the aspen trees:

Please notice how well I pull off the 80s sweater and pink Velcro shoes. Thank you very much.

We went back only once after our move to Oregon, during my second year of high school. I had a hot boyfriend waiting for me back home, and I remember relishing in my childhood vacation spot and missing that boy back home all at the same time. Good thing I eventually married him, so I don't have to feel too strange typing that out for the world to see. My mom and I liked to spend our afternoons reading and drinking hot chocolate in the greenhouse that had been converted to "breakfast room."
Again, you would be kind to point out how well we pull off the bulky sweater craze of the early 90s.

But mostly in my memories is this man, the one usually standing on the other side of the camera, staring out over the mountains from miles above the ocean. I like to see him this way--fatherly still, yes, but something else, too. A real person with real thoughts. There are so many things a person can contemplate while almost literally standing on top of the world like this:
Grief really is like elevation sickness. There's a weight on your chest that lessens over time, through acclimation, but every so often you remember where you are or you try to climb a particularly long flight of stairs and the weight is fresh again, a million cold stones pressing into your ribcage and you feel lucky if you can catch a breath.