Paved Paradise

Cowboys want to date me.

"I reckon it's because you're the smartest prettiest thing they've seen around Montrose for quite some time, but don't you worry I got a good shotgun, we'll keep those troublesome boys away."

I love my uncle. And the thought of him chasing my spur-toting prospective suitors down the gravel driveway with a shotgun about doubles me with laughter.

Can I take him home with me to California? Can he bring the shotgun? Ok, I'm not quite that bitter at the male race, really. :)

I need an imaginary boyfriend. My aunt has come up with some pretty great ideas for one.

That's actually not what I wanted to write, but it was the amusing story of the day.


Deep breath. Here goes.


I turned right unto Tessitore Ln. Alpine Bank. Big blue letters. A sparkling new building behind it, with strikingly modern architecture for this little Western town. But as I pulled the truck behind the bank, passing customers pulling out, I saw the big open field left bare with weeds, all the way to the brand new log fence at the edge of the creek.

It's a waste of land, some would say. This only half-used lot bought by some too-big-for-his-britches investment professional from Denver or Dallas who knew he only needed a half-acre, but didn't care because land is dirt cheap out here and he's got plently of money to throw around.

It's a 7-acre lot. I would know. I've walked very inch of it. I can point to a spot - now somewhere about the middle of the parking lot, that used to be the very best garden in the whole state.

To them it's a peice of land and a bank.

To me, it's a garage with butterflies on it, a big green chair, brown-and-orange flowery curtains in the kitchen window, and morning glories that grew up the clothesline.

To me it's a willow tree and a stack of old tin buckets. It's catching snakes in the irrigation ditch and floating leaf boats through it. It's curling up behind that old green chair after coming in from the snow to warm up by the coal furnace, listening to grandpa scraping up more coal down in the basement to make sure we were all warm enough all night long.

It was breaking icicles off the drain pipe over back porch. It was running across the field from Cedar creek past the chicken coups and opening the squeeky gate with the wire-pull latch. It was eating grandma's soup out of her brown china bowls. It was that speckled floor that now matter how much you spilled, always hid the dirt. It was wearing that old red aporn and helping grandma need bread dough. It was trying to sneak past grandpa napping in his chair but secretly hoping he'd reach out with his long arms and pull me up into his lap and tell me a story. It was watching "The Price is Right" every saturday morning.

It's my childhood.

And now it's a bank and a parking lot. With eerily familar surroundings. And a street named after my family.

Things change, I can accept that. I'm not a little girl and my grandparents aren't alive anymore. But I guess until I saw it with my own eyes, I always thought we left the whole world on the front step when grandma called us for dinner, and that tiny little orange house with the butterflies on the garage door was paradise. And it was.

But it a sadly cliche sentence, they put up a parking lot.