Beginnings, endings, and beginning again...

The first person I met when I moved, in a leap of faith, to Tucson at the end of 2001 was my next door casita neighbor. Five months later we were a couple. A month after that he lost his 40 year old family cabin, high in the Colorado Rockies, to the Hayman fire. It had been a cherished constant in his family's life, a gathering place and retreat for all of them, and was a devastating loss. A loss of much more than a well-used A-frame cabin.



Around the time we were married, he took me on a road trip through Colorado. I'm a landscape junkie, and though I find our mountainous Sonoran desert environment in Tucson spectacular, Colorado was a whole different category. Green. Surface water. Soaring rocky mountains. We camped with our heads a few feet from the Dolores River, wandered Telluride, marveled at the cravasse that is Black Canyon of the Gunnison, soaked in a vast pool fed by the hot springs in Glenwood Springs, and wept at the beauty of Rocky Mountain National Park. Our last night in Colorado was spent sleeping on the old cabin site.

The site is in a collection of five acre plots of land. The neighbors across the lake from us had invited us for dinner in what I can only describe as an enchanted cottage. Hand built, from the ground up, they'd created a Bavarian wonderland. I felt I'd walked into a fairy tale -- one with a happy ending. The evening was warm and welcoming in every possible way. When we returned to the old cabin site, our tent pitched, camp chairs out, we built a fire under a full moon. The cabin had been nestled against a softly eroded granite wall which reflected the fire's light. Hy husband's daughter had given him an unopened bottle of Chivas Regal that had belonged to his long deceased father, the father who he'd helped build the cabin over 40 years before. We decided to open that bottle and drank a toast to his dad, thanking him for all the cherished times and memories.



When we woke up the next morning, snug in our sleeping bags, I knew that my husband needed to reclaim his connection to this place in a concrete way. The land still belonged to the family. The outhouse still stood! In less than two months we were back for Thanksgiving, staying in the 33 foot Airstream Argosy that he'd bought and had parked on the old cabin site. It was a wonderful visit, but one in which we realized that this was not a cold weather abode, but one that would allow visits from mid spring to early fall.



For the past four years we have spent as much time as we could eek out from working lives at our breadbox (as it is affectionately called) in the Rockies, usually a little over two weeks in the summer and another week around the autumnal equinox to see the aspens turn.

Now, as my husband is considering retirement, we've decided to rebuild a cabin on the old site. We love Tucson and will keep it as our primary residence [see my Sonoran Desert blog Writing Down the Desert], but loving Tucson for the long haul means leaving it in the cruelest summer months - June, July, and August at minimum. We're outdoor people and like to hike most days of the week and residing at almost 8,700 feet in Colorado summers will allow that. It will also allow the rest of the family, those who knew the cabin and feel the loss, and the grandchildren who have gotten to know the place and already love it, to reclaim that part of their lives.

Join us as we share this experience of rebuilding and recreating -- more than just a structure -- a home, a way of life, and a family legacy.