Tag Archives: Colorado

Flying Home for Christmas

Posted on by under Guest, Secret Places

The black suede coat my sister passed down didn’t fit me quite right, but it let me play the part of the cosmopolitan European with a little more believability, so I cherished it. I loved wearing it with my knit burgundy scarf tucked in at the collar. I loved how it trailed around my shins as I clip-clopped through airports with bags of gifts and luggage I bought to blend in.

I was flying home for Christmas. I remember changing planes in London, walking down the dismal beige corridor from whatever low-budget airline I’d just taken to the bright spacious British Airways international terminal where I would board my usual flight to Denver. I had been living abroad for a couple years and flying often enough to want to appear confident, worldly, and self-possessed as I navigated the airports of the world.

On this particular day, I got into the line at the gate and stepped up close — very close — to the person ahead of me, just as I was used to doing in post offices and grocery stores in eastern Europe. But I only stood there a moment or two before I started getting strange stares from my fellow passengers.

I was standing less than a foot behind the person in front of me, near enough for my long, ill-fitting coat to graze the back of their boots. All of a sudden I was painfully aware that I was applying my new-found eastern European personal space rules to a bunch of Americans.

Embarrassed, I stepped back a few feet and sheepishly looked around. Surveying the line, I realized I was surrounded by a field of North Face parkas, Denver Bronco hats and Colorado college team t-shirts. These were my people. We might have been in a boarding line in London, but these were westerners, used to wide open spaces and neighborly elbow room that spans miles.

Personal space is one of those secrets you learn only by trial and observation —by finding yourself on the receiving end of strange stares, or by being cut in front of when you habitually leave too much space between you and the postal clerk. My moment of embarrassment in applying the wrong personal space rules to the wrong context was a moment when I became aware I had left one place and arrived in another without realizing it.

Sometimes it takes awhile to figure out where you are.

3995564048_0d9bc6fb97_oFurthermore, airports are full of another type of ambiguous space, places of boundaries and thresholds. Doorways or hallways, corridors, waiting rooms, boarding lines —  these are not destinations in and of themselves. They are liminal, or in-between, places; places where we make transitions or where changes happen. 

Liminal spaces can be places of discomfort, anxiety, and self-consciousness, but also of freedom. What I experienced during my years of frequent travel was both the anxieties of transition, and, more significantly, the presence of God in those spaces. Liminal spaces were where God met me more intimately because I was in motion, open to surprises.

There was the Christmas morning flight when I spent an hour in on a layover, reading from Isaiah in the Bible laid open on the airport chapel table; or the times when the music in my earbuds would transform an ordinary security checkpoint into a holy sea of pilgrims. One flight, two missionary women were seated in my row and we spent nearly the whole flight sharing struggles and praying together.

And once, a German woman in a train station who saw me crying in a moment of frustration promised, “Morgen Besser,” which I understood as, “it’ll be better in the morning.” In the enchanted terrain of liminal space, I felt carried and carried along.

Morgen Besser. God has always spoken the most clearly and dearly in these secret spaces of travel, holding me as closely as baggage that might be lost along the way.  

When I think now about how vividly God met me in those turbulent times, I am tempted to think that I no longer have access to knowing Him with that particular intimacy.  Then I remember, life itself is a liminal space. I don’t have to be on an actual journey; there enough metaphorical ones to keep me alert. We’re all moving between birth and death, between one identity and another almost constantly, and God is still waiting to meet me in these in-between, unsettled places.

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jenniferJennifer Stewart Fueston writes in Longmont, Colorado where she lives with her husband and two young sons. She has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and Lithuania. This year, her poems have appeared in Windhover, The Other Journal and The Cresset.  Her chapbook of poetry entitled, Visitations, was published in 2015. She blogs very sporadically at jenniferstewartfueston.com and uses Twitter (@jenniferfueston) primarily during playoff football and for ranting during election season.

Photograph by Kevin Dooley

 

The Epitome of Cakedom

Posted on by under Food & Place, Guest

The public library was a weekly haunt for me growing up. My mom and I would part ways at the door, she heading for the fiction section and me to the children’s room.

During one trip in my pre-teen years, I found the “Beany Malone” series by Lenora Mattingly Weber, and found another family to belong to—mine was actually quite wonderful, but these characters somehow connected with another part of me in the ways good characters do. I wanted to live next door to the Malones—and at the same time, I did. I spent so much of my free time at their home in Denver I could tell you just how old Beany was when she finally got her room painted “a shade halfway between robin’s egg blue and the sky in August.” Though they lived thirty years in the past, for me they were contemporaries. They lived knowing they were a family. I loved that about them. And when I emerged from my room to join my own family, the air of their camaraderie followed me down the stairs, and helped me see and name the good things my family brought to me.

Most of all, I loved their family meals. I loved watching how Beany, still a teenager, planned out the meals, using her ingenuity and thrift to keep the Malone table filled with good food, prettily presented.

But when it came time for extravagance and celebration, her older brother Johnny Malone was the one I wanted to see in the kitchen. I grew up believing his Lady Eleanor Cake was the epitome of cake-dom, with its fifteen egg whites and “feather light, velvety texture.” When the Lady Eleanor Cake was in the oven at the Malone house, it was my best indication the event was special. This extravagant cake—fifteen egg whites in wartime!—conferred value on people and events, and reminded me that the best creations are the ones we share with others.

I wondered about the cake, possibly obsessed about it. I wondered enough to purchase the Beany Malone Cookbook not once, but twice—each time amazed it didn’t include this essential Malone family recipe. I’m not sure why now, in adulthood, I decided to stop wondering and get busy in the kitchen, but I did, determined to create my own recipe for the Lady Eleanor Cake. Virtual meals, in fictitious places, can only sustain you so much. And it was time to move from Denver, in the 1940s, into the new century.

7024892047_89e44031cb_oSomething with fifteen egg whites most likely would be in the angel cake category, so I started there. But “velvety” is not how I would describe the spongy texture of angel cake. It needed a bit more depth. It needed more vanilla, a just a bit of the richness of egg yolk, along with the egg whites. I went through five variations, with my family gamely trying every version.  We had an ever-changing mixture based on angel cakes, chiffon cakes, and a lemon cake, striving to get something worthy of the hours of daydreaming I’ve done about this cake over my lifetime. But it eluded me. Egg whites became a staple on my grocery list. By the end, my daughter knew when she heard the mixer going for ten minutes or so, she would be called upon about an hour later to judge if this version was both “feather light” and a “velvety texture.”  It had to be both!

I considered it a significant moment when, on my birthday, I finally got the right proportion of ingredients. And a fictitious family from the 1940s, who had invited me to their home on a quiet street in Denver, Colorado, reached through the pages and joined my family in New York, helping us celebrate in style.

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Andrea%2BDoering%2BPhotoAndrea Doering is an editor, freelance writer, author of three books for children, and most recently The Children’s Table: Recipes and Meals Inspired by Favorite Children’s Stories. She lives in New York, just one block away from the children’s library.

Mixing bowl photo by Barb Hoyer, on Creative Commons

Forks Over Headaches

Posted on by under Food & Place

Last month I was at my first doctor’s visit since moving to Colorado, with a list of complaints the length of my arm.

I’ve been dealing with chronic pain for a while now. Headaches that last for days, gastritis, asthma, mysterious bladder pain. It’s nothing I can’t deal with but sometimes my complaints whip themselves up into a perfect storm of sickness and I’ll lose half a day’s work. Then the next day I’ll be right as rain. Quite frankly, it’s exhausting, so I thought I’d have a doctor check me out and prescribe some nice pain medication to help me through my weeks and months.

The doctor listened to me sympathetically, and then, before I could ask for the drugs, she stated flatly: “You need to try a gluten-free, dairy-free diet. For two months. Can you do that?”

I gulped and said yes. I’d done it before, but as ice cream and pancakes are my weakness, the commitment was rife with infidelity.

I’m noticing a big difference between medicine in Connecticut and medicine in Colorado. In Connecticut, if you tell a doctor you’re feeling “off”, they’ll whip out a prescription pad right away. “You cry a lot?” one doctor asked me, busy scribbling away on his pad. “Zoloft should work.” Here in Colorado, health professionals tend to tout dietary restrictions and hefty amounts of exercise to combat illness and pain, prescribing drugs as a last resort.

Needless to say, I have always poo-pooed other people’s dietary restrictions—perhaps because there’s a small part of me that gets angry when I see someone else exerting more control than I do over food. Now I’m on the other end of that. I say no thank you when pizza is offered, and then face the same kind of impatient, weak smile that I used to give my friends when they refused the pizza I offered.

Yet, surprisingly, having this particular restriction has not been all that bad. In fact, it’s been a relief. I love pizza and chips and ice cream, and I do get uncomfortable and conflicted inside when I see them.  But I know and Dan agrees that a migraine is not worth any amount of ice cream.

ice-cream-865126_1280

Dan and I decided right from the beginning that whatever changes I’d need to make, he’d make as well. We know some couples that maintain separate diets and dining schedules but neither of us wants that. I didn’t want to conceal any of my illnesses from Dan when we married and that’s made it easier to make changes—as big as a whole new eating plan—without grief or guilt or dividedness.

I began reading up on what kinds of dishes I can make so we won’t feel deprived. We decided on a mostly plant-based diet, thereby eliminating most dishes that call for cheese or milk (and so we wouldn’t end up choosing a kale-and-kale-only diet out of ignorance of what vegans and vegetarians really eat). I bought the Forks Over Knives cookbook and a food processor and threw out the leftover flour, white sugar, and cheese. I bought nutritional yeast, which we’re convinced is really goldfish food but it doesn’t taste too bad in dressings. My friend Pam, a vegan, told me all about soaking beans and rice before cooking with them so they’re more digestible. And, although this was originally to be a wheat and milk-free diet, we’ve found ourselves making all sorts of little tweaks and changes. Reading labels, trying to buy cage-free chicken.

How do I feel a few bags of dried beans, tamari, kale, sweet potatoes, almond milk, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, and a little salmon later?

Pretty good.

It’s been four weeks and I’ve only had two minor headaches. We don’t talk to many people about our diet because, you know, there are a lot of naysayers. But I’ve learned that I can destroy my health very easily if I don’t pay proper attention to it. It’s nearly impossible to describe a migraine to someone who’s never had one.

I’ve decided not to give up ice cream. It’s been a faithful if not-so-great companion for too long. I make it out of frozen bananas and peanut butter and coconut cream. It’s still too early to tell if the restrictive diet will be a life decision. I can’t imagine never eating cheese again! But limitations, I’m finding, are actually ushering me into a new kind of creativity. Not a bad trade off.

Elena bio YAH

The cost of playing cowboy

Posted on by under Money & Place

“It’s like a resort for rich Christians who want to spend a week pretending to be cowboys.”

This was my standard explanation of Deer Valley Ranch when I told college friends where I had spent the summer working. There was really no better way to describe in a nutshell the wonderful yet bizarre place—especially from the perspective of someone like me, who had grown up solidly middle class, taking budget vacations that involved sleeping in a tent and eating Mom-made sandwiches at scenic overlooks.

My upbringing in the Midwest also fueled my fascination with Deer Valley Ranch. While several of my friends lived on farms and had horses, no one seemed particularly intent on embracing the romantic charade of playing cowboy. Maybe Michigan’s wooded trails and country roads just didn’t provide the sort of Wild West backdrop necessary for getting in the cowboy mood.

18908034673_9961758d39_bDeer Valley Ranch, near Buena Vista Colorado, definitely has the right backdrop. The ranch is nestled in a range of mountains known as “the fourteeners,” with Mt. Princeton’s Chalk Cliffs rising dramatically behind the lodge and horse stables. The whole setting suggests the work of a talented stage crew under the direction of God (with a very large budget). The actors in our theatre were the staff—the other Christian college students and I, in our Wranglers and cowboy boots and hats—and our drama relied on “breaking the third wall” by inviting  guests to participate in the action.

We took the cowboy narrative pretty far down the trail at Deer Valley. I quickly learned it was what the guests were paying for—good-clean-Christian-family-cowboy-fun. Each week started off with an all-ranch hymn-sing led by Cowboy Dave, an event that served to set the tone and to begin drawing guests together with their common beliefs (not to mention their shared vacation proclivities).

Those of us working as servers in the dining room completed our Wranglers-and-cowboy-boots costumes with a red or navy gingham checked shirt and a contrasting bandana around our necks. We carried large trays filled with plates of authentic Western food, like beef brisket and whole trout. (Sometimes the cook prepared the very fish that had been caught earlier in the day by the guests. You have to pay good money to catch your own dinner.)

Square dance nights on the deck called for full staff participation. It was our job to urge hesitant guests out onto the dance floor unders the sky to learn the line dance moves, or to succumb to the lively two-stepping spins of an eager old cowboy in need of a partner.

4812123590_c50fae710e_zBut the Cowboy Breakfast was the Deer Valley act that topped all others. A couple of times a week a handful of staff got up at the crack of dawn to travel off-road in an ancient pickup truck to our wilderness breakfast site. Once there, we started a cooking fire, letting it get nice and hot before adding cast iron skillets of bacon, to be joined later by scrambled eggs and grits. Big pots of “cowboy coffee” were added to the grate, ready to pour into tin cups when the guests arrived.

Even at the end of my summer at the ranch I still fought a bemused smile when Cowboy Dave and his crew came rounding the bend on their horses, each rider in full cowboy attire. We greeted them with a boisterous “Good mornin’!” as they dismounted and walked over on stiff bow-legs to grab a tin cup and load up a plate at the fire.

How could I not inwardly chuckle as I slopped grits on someone’s plate and Cowboy Dave swung his guitar around from its perch on his back to begin playing suitably-mournful cowboy songs? The guests were sore, cold, and sleepy after getting up before the sun to sit too long in the saddle. The plates I spooned grits onto weren’t those nice, speckled blue enamel sets you buy at camping stores—they were dented dull grey metal. And the coffee we served was full of grounds. As someone who had grown up roughing it on the cheap, I found plenty of irony in people spending significant sums on such an experience.

But there were those incredible mountains reaching up behind the guests as they crunched into another piece of bacon and their horses munched on some feed nearby.  And I had to admit, my feet felt good in my cowboy boots, and there was something energizing about a deep intake of that high-altitude air. I even began to understand that having things like shiny plates and gourmet coffee would ruin the charade these folks had paid good money for. And what’s any expensive vacation, after all, if not a charade to help us vacate reality for a handful of days?

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Kristin bio YAH

Photo of Mt. Princeton’s Chalk Cliffs by Wongaboo. 

Cowboy and horse photo by Just Too Lazy.