On Leaving Boulder

My most recent post was last May -- a world has come and gone -- indeed several of my worlds have come and gone in that interval. Old beefs. New epiphanies. Life.

And all of a sudden we're moving back to Washington DC, this Tuesday in fact, so what do I think about Boulder and moving away from?

2 1/2 years of trying to finesse the unbridgeable, really. After so many years abroad, to return to the States to a place like Boulder and during a presidential election campaign was pure madness. We don't always get to choose our life ponds. But do we really have to be thrown into the ponds we need?

Boulder's issues can be summed up in one (long) sentence: Folks in the "happiest" place in the USA take pleasure in making themselves miserable and others even more so by pointing fingers/moralizing/sermonizing/locking up/editorializing against anyone different from them all on the side of "diversity." Lockstep. Bitter fruits of the Baby-Boomer generation.

That said, I will miss a lot about Boulder:
*Going about my daily business with the mountains as
backdrop, amaaazing to be surrounded in such elegance even when walking across the Jersey Pike aka Route 36, or dropping stuff off at the dry cleaners.
*Jogging around the rec park with the dawning sun setting the mountains aglow and the hot air balloons soaring against their profile.
*Loving all my FABulous friends.
*Shopping at Anthropologie/Safeway/Sephora/Target/BBB when they still mailed out coupons, Two Sole Sisters for beautiful company and astonishing shoes, Gypsy Jewel for wonderful everything and Tibetan Prayer Flags.
*Eating at the Kitchen, once upon a time at the Leaf.
*Having a Rolfer, Naturopath, Masseur, Rebecca's Apothecary.
*Starting a BLOG or two.
*Embarking upon the agony and the ecstasy of photography.
*Growing my hair longer and going BLONDE with Lindsey at Colours.
*Enjoying Total Body Pampering at Aisha's Aesthetics.
*Going crazy at the Bookworm.
*Admiring authors at their evenings at the Boulder Bookstore.
*Ummm ... dodging bicycles anywhere/everywhere.
*Choosing among gorgeous gorgeous fabrics at Elfriede's.
*Reading the Daily Camera and the Denver Post.
*Oooh have you been to the Kirkland Museum in Denver?
*Missing every darn show at the BMOC.
*Appreciating the public landscaping along the avenues/boulevards/streets.
*Kissing the zebra-walk stripes that don't get washed away in the rain.
*Turning the clock back by shopping at the CU Campus Bookstore.
*Taking lessons at the Apple Store to learn my new mac.
*Riding the public buses and meeting the true diverse Boulder public.
*Going up to Ned for art with Catherine and massage with Ian.
*Putting my Subaru "Thor" into the tender loving care of Import Specialists.
*Not yet drinking Bhakti Chai.
*Trying to love herbal tea.
*Discovering netflix.
*Being sucked into Fox News.
*Mailing at the best post offices ever.

A lot to miss. A lot to take with me. I've realized that although I'll miss McGuckin's Hardware I'll love Strosnider's in Bethesda. How shall I replace Mikes Camera for photo prints? At RitzCamera right up Wisconsin Ave. Yum to Vace's Pizza. Drycleaning around the corner. Washington's best nursery just a block away.

And so it goes.
Culture Shock, Culture Embrace, Culture Exchange, Culture Loss.

Reality Life.

Oh to be in Boulder, now that spring is here

My naturopath said I have no blood, no chi.

I'd known something was off. The past year -- let me be honest and acknowledge them years -- had left me short of memory, bereft of love, delinquent in responsibility. That wasn't like me

She took my pulse and said: Feel here. I felt my blood pulse this way, and then that, like a tick-tock clock, I was shocked! She said: That's what happens when your blood pools and stagnates, it can't make up its mind, You aren't making up Your mind.

But. I said.

She said: Check your belief system.

I visited my Rolfer, who worked on my nervous system and diagnosed stuckness, indecision. But, I said. She said making no decision is making a decision. But. Check your belief system.

My Life Coach: Chidingly ditto.

Prescription: pancreatic enzymes, homeopathic cell salt pills, precious and free and easy herbal elixir, parsley tea, red meat 4x a week, darts; and the courage to say No Thank You to two associations and a bully.

Wow! Old self-clutched obstacles released started a passion moving through my brain, my guts -- could it be my blood and chi are returning?

Time to check my pulse.

May Day!

What a fresh feeling on the first day of the month! I rip off my calendar page for April past and think: May Day! Now I have a new chance to start anew -- all over again.

Bit of a "virgin with each new moon" kinda syndrome.

And why not? If we have to be mature adults tending to our children's demands and our parents woes, who for heavens sakes wouldn't want to live that month-end redemption 12x a year?

And what did I do to the celebrate the re-passing of the moments? tried on a bit of home-grown charizma.

What is it, exactly, that I put away with April's passing?

For starters, any possible, improbable, unnecessary guilt over inheriting and driving Beautiful Daughter's Subaru Legacy 2000 (way used when we bought it two years ago.)

I had already paid my bus-taking dues in Boulder for a year and a half. I do, yes I really do appreciate the flora and fauna more available for experience while waiting at the bus stops; I am, I really am grateful that I know the weather of Boulder up front and in my face.

Driving in spring -- window down -- Eddie Vedder LOUD!

Yet what has lingered with me is that ineffable sense of lostness that the advent of spring can bring -- a melancholy of the blood, a seeking-searching of the heart for -- who can tell?

Is it for that sense of "home" that once was and is not now? Or for the first love, that was perfect then and even though renewed can never be unflawed again?

My body holds those memories of enchantment, my soul enshrines them, and now what?

What can I, must I teach my daughter of Life?

That the joy and tears come again in springtime.

The Season -- March 21-June 21 -- nothing but/everything and the uses of enchantment. For the weather is nothing if not up and down, moods back and forth, plans to bask in sunshine on again, off again.

Desperately seeking magic!

Found -- in a zone of gemstones, beauteous females, swains-in-thrall, presided over by the mistress of enchantment who can transform dorm beds into bowers, blue feelings into feeling welcomed.

Call it enchantment-by-old-soul, or the charizma of an empath, our Boulder Ceres tempts us back to life with Navaratna seeds entwined about our necks, dripping from our lobes.

I want some.

Say it with flowers

People are always so happy to see me when I arrive with flowers.

Or if not happy, exactly, relieved, then, because they know that I've come with a gesture of politesse, of enough goodwill to finesse perhaps an awkward evening of unfriendship or downright disagreement.

That said, bearing flowers offers me a fragrant scrim of etiquette when I'm up against the raw fact that I've been invited because they had to.

Ah well, although I'm very well aware that life holds greater terrors, I appreciate flowers for their willingness to be the sacrifice in the bloody wars of petty genteelity.

When the weather turned warmer -- again -- I put my long-suffering cyclamen from Christmas, and the two Christmas cactuses from Thanksgiving, out on the table on my balcony.

Was that a nice thing to do to my trusting house-plants? After all, I did it with a fair degree of "It's time you became truly one with your own mother, Nature." Unfair of me, really, because these are tropical plants whose DNA was not meant to thrive in zenBoulder's high dry up-and-down temperatures, even if the thermometer does say April.

Hey, I try to bloom where I've been planted, too.

Two plants I won't dare put out quite yet are The Girls, my landlord's especial pets.

Andrew's now in law school in Florida, but whenever he shows up and visits to tend to things, he always checks in with them first. He croons and strokes their green fronds. I mean really.

Um ... I think I'm just jealous, the guy is a young Frank Sinatra type, all sinew and young swagger. But he certainly trusts me with his stuff, so grateful to be renting to a responsible adult-type than a pair of CU undergrads.

My lease renewal is a sure thing.

In the spirit of May Day, then, the one for dancing around the May Pole and celebrating spring's flowers, I'm going to give my neighbors some blossoms.

Nothing big, mind you, just a posy of gorgeously patterned-paper origami lilies wrapped around their doorknobs early in the morning before they're up to work or out to take those last final exams.

Beautiful Daughter and I discovered how to make these perfect paper blooms when we started her Brownie Scout Troop in Sofia, and have relished making them, and remembering the memories, ever since.

Say it with a sneak attack of flowers!

a late April afternoon

The light green of the pre-leaves on the trees outside my window is wistful against the spring gustiness of the Sunday afternoon.

Perhaps it's because I want it to be warmer and sunnier, more forceful weather, which is when I emerge after a winter's worth of browns and blossom into my own.

Yes, the light green is lovelier than the park bench paint of summer's suburban grassiness, but it is far more fragile. And the pastel petal pinks of small trees and shrubs is exquisite up close, but not lasting.

Where is the bold chrome yellow of Long Island's forsythia?

Boulder spring is but a melting ache between rough seasons.

Pomegranate Dreams

A rusty wheelbarrow full of yellow-red pomegranates sits on the cracked sidewalk; beside it, a scruffy farmer tipped back in his chair, waiting to sell his fruit by the kilo to evening passersby. Not the stuff of dreams to Turkish villagers in harvest-time. But an astonishing sight to this American who pays in gold for three perfect globes for her coffee table display each Thanksgiving. Yet that same farmer, nor his wife, couldn't, wouldn't dream of placing such ordinary items in a decorative category. To marvel, surely -- how shall we agree that these are a dream, or the everyday?

A picture is worth ...

When all else fails, read the instructions.

After months of owning a brand-new Canon PowerShot SD890 IS, carrying it around with me to Turkey and Manhattan and Colorado but regarding it with a nervous "I'll try it out tomorrow" declaration, I finally got down to business this afternoon and did it!

I took pictures out my bedroom window, and then from my front balcony, and in a totally roundabout fashion managed to post them to my Facebook page and BLOG. YAY!!!

Did the instruction booklet help? Kinda sorta. The downloading steps didn't connect with my uploading desires.

To be cont ...