Passing Through

They came in shortly before closing, the little girl first, followed by her mother with the same copper-bright hair, and finally her father, hair color hidden under a ballcap. They were looking for Crested Butte shirts; they’d spent the day skiing, but for some semi-articulated reason decided not to linger up there. Gilly is always […]

Benched

Somewhere in my book collection, quite possibly still in this house, resided a Weekly Reader book selection entitled A Place By the Fire, about a gruff old sheepherder and his border collie that was getting too old to be a working dog. As is true on a lot of real-life farms and ranches, it’s not […]

Christmas Tiredings

Yesterday I got one sentence into a Christmas post and then stopped. I’m sorry; it just doesn’t feel much like Christmas, and I don’t know why. I mean, you can point to Corona and I can say “sure,” but really, our Christmas so far today isn’t looking all that different from many of them. Lynn […]

A Tale of Two Monies

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it […]

Party On

Does it feel like I’ve been gone forever? It does to me, and here’s the heck of it: I had plenty of topics for you all last week, just no time. Okay, I’m sure there was time, but I allocated it elsewhere. In a life where we think we can have it all, it still […]

Frenetic

This week. A lot of them this year seem to have screamed by, which seems kind of weird for a year stuck in limbo. But this week in particular has felt completely out of control, and I’ve decided to blame the weather. Not that I want to cast aspersions on a highly needed commodity. It […]

Respond — But Only If You Please

I am hosting a party in less than a week. It’s not at my house like it was last year and was intended to be again this year; it’s at the guests’ own houses on their own computers. But I’m still hosting it, and it would be nice to prepare. Do you know how many […]

Virtuality

I know: there are people who have been living this sort of life since the world shut down in March, but it has only just come to me how much time I spend in a virtual space these days. Not, actually, that this is all bad. If there were a county meeting scheduled in the […]

Messin’ With Texas

I don’t know what Texas pays its attorney general, but however much it is, it’s clearly too much. The Texas AG since 2014 is named Ken Paxton, and we here in Gunnison County are already familiar with his affinity for spurious lawsuits and his inclination to do favors for his donors. Taking care of the […]

Gassed

I don’t remember, particularly, the dream I was having shortly before I woke up one of several times last night, but it involved being driven around some obstacle-laden course really fast — and something about a man being paid in rubber ducks, which didn’t seem very lucrative to me. When I did finally wake up, […]