Report from Colorado

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As my husband and I and our two-week-old son, Eric, rounded the last curve into our Colorado mountain valley, the meadow met our eyes in all its delicate beauty. Sloping down from a grass-covered hill, the aspen trees—as yet bare of ti leaves—surrounded a small lake, and covering the mount were the firs that gave our valley its name: Conifer Hill. property belonged to my mother, and was our new home.

Before we could get into the cabin, though, we had to chop through the ten inches of ice that had accumulated in front of the door. Moving in consisted of setting up a bed in one end of the house , shifting Mother's possessions to the other and building a fire in the stove. We were home.

That spring was idyllic. Larry didn't have a job, but we had enough money for food and gasoline, While the snow was still on the ground, the picture that greeted my eyes every morning was soft and gentle and filled my heart with peace. Then leaves started to bud, and a pale green merged with the darker color of the pines. We saw the first flowers of spring, heard frogs begin their croaking from the lake, felt the world coming alive.

When our income tax refunds arrived in April, we bought a tipi kit and spent a few days putting together our summer dwelling. I was supposed to be the seamstress in the farm but Larry turned out to be more capable of handling the heavy canvas, reading the instructions and not having tantrums at the sewing machine . . . so he did the work practically singlehanded.

Then summer came and we cleared ground for the tipi, set it up and moved in. I had an outside kitchen—wood stove, cabinets and table—under a plastic tarp.

The major problem I faced that summer was keeping our shelter clean. Although I had our clothes piled in boxes, they usually overflowed onto the floor. The carpet we had laid over the dirt helped the housekeeping, but became damp and mildewed. Laundry was another headache. We couldn't afford take our wash to a laundromat and I hated imposing on friends for the use of their facilities.

In July Larry started to work . . . and that presented new problems. We couldn't live up in the valley without a vehicle that could travel the road all winter, so we borrowed the down payment for a Toyota Landcruiser.

At the end of August we moved back into the cabin. It wasn't intended as a winter dwelling, and we worked hard stalling insulation and plugging holes. The house was T-shaped with the kitchen off the center, and the stove in the middle of the long room was supposed to keep the cooking area warm . . . fine in theory, but in practice raw by the time I finished preparing a meal.

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