When we first moved here, I was in a daze. I was lost in the fog of trauma and it was hard for me to look around and see where exactly it was that I had landed. I was like a seed blown far from a tree, cold and scared and totally within myself. But as the winter wore on, and I began to heal, I could feel myself waking up. And as I did, I began to see the beauty even in the barrenness of winter.
I no longer saw only dry grass in empty fields, I saw golden hills and the craggy rocks. I noticed the cottonwoods lining the banks of the creek, slow moving though she may be in winter time. I began to notice the dramatic rises and low swoops of the hills around our home. In a series of tiny moments, our home in this “nothing town” became more than just one of the craziest life choices we have ever made. It also became the most magical—something the herd of deer leaping into the patch of evergreens along the hill behind our house had known all along.
When I tell people that we live south east of Denver, they assume that we live on the plains. When they hear we are starting a farm, they picture flat land, with nary a tree in sight. But that is not this place. Here we stand at nearly 7,000 feet above sea level. (A zone 4 our local garden store owner insists.) Here we sit nestled in a valley with a creek active enough that it once catastrophically flooded the town, washing two-thirds of the structures away. And though these trees are not tall like the ones you’d find on the east coast, or even in the midwest, they are trees like you would find in our mountains here in Colorado.
Then my husband Willy came home the other day and told me something that made it all make sense. We live on something called the Palmer Divide—it’s a section of topography that juts out from the Rocky Mountains in a ridge of hills that would be considered foothills, if only they were close enough to the mountains. Here we get twice as much snow as in Denver, and it was this moisture that contributed to the first booming export of Elbert County—lumber.
Yes that’s right. This ranch land which is now so easy to see between patches of trees was once completely forested. The Black Forest, which still exists south of here, towards Colorado Springs, once covered these hills too, and most of Denver was built from the lumber harvested here in Elbert County. It’s both impressive, and quite sad to me. Now when I look at this land in between patches of trees, I try and imagine what it looked like all covered in trees. Now when I look at the old buildings of Denver, I’ll know where their wood was grown.
There is still beauty here. The open places make good pastures for cattle, the trade of many who now live here. But I think of all the aquifers underneath my parents property, and I know that they once fed hundreds of trees. In fact, in their neighborhood, one of the very few rules of their HOA is that they are not allowed to remove any old trees—something I at first thought strange, but now admire so deeply as a move to reforest a once lushly green space. Things have grown here—and things will grow here again. Our orchard, which once seemed such an outlandish idea in such a high elevation space, will be right at home with the water and the sunlight here. When I walk down the hill of my parent’s property to what we have christened the Meadow Market Garden, I can feel the magic rising: the glow of what has been, and what can be again. Something new, renewed.
Earlier this year when the weather was just starting to warm, and the countryside was slowing turning green as if painted by the light hand of a watercolor artist, I heard it unmistakably on my drive home from town: “Grace—it’s springtime.”
The Voice, so familiar and yet one I don’t feel like I had been able to hear for awhile. Tears sprang to my eyes immediately, because thats what happens when you feel the deep longings of your soul beginning to be fulfilled—when you can finally see the tiniest sliver of dawn along a dark horizon. It was a long night, and a longer winter.
But here on the north face of the Palmer Divide—we will plant seeds, and they will grow. And I will plant myself, a wayward fallen seed, looking so dead and dormant on the outside—but give me all this water and sunlight and nestle me deeply in this scarred but sacred earth, and I will plant my roots, and I too will grow.
This is lovely Grace and what a blessing to feel those nudges of healing ❤️🩹 Susan
Thanks for sharing this! Very strange to think about the history of the land we sit on, and the sadness of the beauty lost, but the hope of the beauty that is still there (and will be rebuilt). I love trees! But in South Africa, most of our big trees are not indigenous. Some can grow quickly and are farmed, others take over (they call them alien invasives). Our house was SO cold and dark (and pointed the WRONG WAY FOR THE MAXIMUM SUN, which is so important in South African winters because houses here have no heating and it can get to freezing at night!) BUT, after living here a while we realised it's not capturing as much sun as a north facing house, but it is pointed east towards the sunrise, which would have been visible over the valley before this block of "alien invasive trees" took over the field opposite our house.