Going Home

“Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood — we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.”
― Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

Do you remember that place in nature where you could be alone in your own little biosphere of imagination…yes, well this was mine.

This small Colorado reservoir is about half a mile from my childhood home on rural high plains farmland. It was my oasis many summer afternoons as a 13 year-old girl. I would take long rides with a horse named Rebel, usually ending up at this small lake. The name was suitable for the nine year-old gelding as he followed his own inner drum. Rebel often jumped the corral fence during thunderstorms racing down to the next farmhouse to visit the resident mares! Also, he would only allow females to ride him, tossing men off his back in an instant. I could ride him bareback and feel completely protected by the gentleness of his strength and size.

A side note, this guy was an incredible barrel racer, and together we won a few ribbons in local gymkhanas back in the day.

During our rides I often carried a pencil and pad for thoughts and prose. I would sit under the sheltering cottonwoods for hours lost in my imagination, while my friend grazed a variety of tasty lakeside grasses. Back then summers were hot and peaceful in the northern Colorado farmland. There was no noise from oil trucks or the pumping stations. No traffic from commuters to Denver. Just farmers going about their daily lives changing irrigation pipes, baling alfalfa or chatting along the roadside with neighbors in the summer sun.

Next to this body of water was a small house for seasonal workers who arrived each summer to work in the fields. The children were often outside playing in the summer heat as their mothers hung laundry on the clothesline. The small home was surrounded by fields of growing corn or beets. The crop irrigation cooled the dry air those summer days in the rural countryside, as did the daily afternoon thunderstorms.

Last summer I took a drive up to visit our old home. Afterwards, I went over to reminisce at the small reservoir. It was still peaceful though had noticeably less trees surrounding her edges, and as magically serene as my memories reflected. The small house was gone, replaced by a large oil pumping station—a sign of the times.

As for our old farmhouse it is now just the house, beautifully renovated, but the lush garden and cottonwoods are gone. The large barn was also torn down. There were two large iMac computers sitting inside the glassed-in porch with top-end SUV’s in the dirt drive. The residents are probably not local, but commuters to cities close by.

Farming still exists, though not as prolific as all those years ago…but still beautifully pristine as always in June. And my childhood view of Longs and Meeker Peaks, often referred to as Twin Peaks, is still gloriously prominent reminding me how lucky I was to grow up in this magnificently stunning landscape.