Glory

Well, I'm about 95% recovered from getting my wisdom teeth removed last week. After 4 days basically spent on the couch eating ice cream and/or getting sick from pain medication, I'm happy to be back in the world! I just wish my mouth didn't still hurt when I eat anything more difficult to chew than a banana. This week we are sooo-o-o-o close to nailing down a place to live (finally), but I'm not going to say anything about anything until anything is finalized. because I don't want to jinx it! My nerves just can't take it.

Life update completed, I've been reminiscing lately about my favorite vacations as a child. My family used to spend summers at a dude ranch in middle of the Rocky Mountains, about 90 minutes west of Colorado Springs, called Lost Valley, and when I think about those days there is a lingering sweetness and sense of adventure and wholeness that accompanies my memories.

We used to haul out there in our SUV, taking turns riding in the middle seat, smushed together with baggage and a giant cooler full of food so we wouldn't have to stop so often. We stayed the night in Raton, NM, a source for some hilarious memories and terrible food in the sketchiest town I've ever visited. On the second day, we would begin the journey through the foothills of the Rockies, up into Colorado. I remember watching lightning play across the sky through the car window, feeling as though we were on an epic adventure. And then the last nine miles of the journey - off the paved road and around the mountain, driving slowly because there was literally nothing substantial to stop the car from going off the road. And then, around a final bend, the ranch property would be revealed, a hidden paradise nestled amongst the peaks.

source: The Dude Rancher's Association

Every day of the week, although scheduled from dawn to dusk, felt slow and relaxing and right. I still remember the taste of the indulgent food they cooked and served each morning, luscious buttery eggs hot from the pan, thick Belgian waffles with real maple syrup, and of course, Lucky Charms, the forbidden fruit of my youth which I only ever got to eat on vacation. We ate in the dining hall, a rustic wooden palace covered in homemade brands (there's a tradition that every family that visits creates a brand and picks a spot for it on the wall, and then you put a tick mark next to it every year your come back), with a wide porch overlooking a meadow and festooned with hummingbird feeders. Days at Lost Valley brought plenty of horseback riding, loping through the meadows, up and down mountain trails, before tying off the horses at a destination (most likely a ridge somewhere) and eating lunch, sandwiches and chips and a cookie. Food always tastes better when it's eaten outside. It was in that setting that I learned to love the smell of horses, sweat and leather and hay and sunshine. It's the scent of being alive. We told tall tales and legends about the ranch, the stories different every time (I remember one involving a dinosaur attack), we skipped rocks by the creek and ate ice cream with marshmellow topping from the snack store. Once we played the best game of capture the flag I've ever experienced, involving raw eggs as weapons. In the evenings there were cookouts and campfires and music and fireflies. There was a square dance one night, and a ridiculously acted melodrama on another.

My family liked to go during cattle week, the first week of the summer, when the working ranch brought in the cows to be branded and turned out in the fields for the summer. The yearlings would keep you up all night mooing for the mothers they had been separated from, unless you were staying in Huff and Puff, the cabins at the very top of the hill. I watched my dad brand a calf, and my parents sometimes chose to go on the All-Day Ride, which involved the actual herding of cows from what I was told (I was never old enough to go). At the end of the week they had a rodeo, during which my sister once got thrown from her horse and needed stitches in her chin - but still won the barrel racing event.

I believe there are places on this earth, like Lost Valley, that are just a little closer to heaven, where you can feel God surrounding you at every moment and the earth is trembling with the tension between the earthly and the divine, as though it could shatter and let the raw glory of it burst free. I want to love a God who can make a place like this and instill every molecule within it with his glory. Maybe someday I'll go back there, and ride the trails again and watch the hummingbirds and feel the freezing trickle of the creek water. It probably wouldn't be the same. But regardless, my heart still lives there, in a little valley in the middle of nowhere, with the scent of pine on the breeze and the sound of birds singing in the air.