The many joys of life off The Fish
We arranged months ago to spend hurricane season housesitting for my sister Laura in Denver while she escaped to the family cottage on Lake L’Homme Dieu in MN for the first half of the summer. Since we had to come back sooner than expected she was able to leave a little earlier than she’d planned. But first, her garden.
A double lot in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood means gorgeous, huge, beautiful gardens, all along the front of the house, the back yard, and the side yard where the huge old blue spruce trees used to be. It was early May, and the lines at the garden centers were long, but we braved them anyway. I mean, it was early May, and that’s what you do in early May. Then you spend those glorious days following the first of many trips to the garden centers digging holes and planting all those healthy little green plants you found – tomatoes, herbs, perennial flowers, marigolds to protect the tomatoes – and lots and lots of seeds. The hummingbird and grape vines needed pruning, and there were always plenty of weeds to pull. Last year’s sunflowers left enough seed behind to ensure a blanket of sunflower seedlings across the entire front garden, and despite thinning them repeatedly they still crowded the open spaces amongst intentional plantings to require ducking and shimmying and eventually just breaking off branches on the way through. I was in heaven.
So off she went to the north country, and we settled into the routine of feeding the dogs, Huckle and Daisy, the cat, Doris, and chickens, maintaining the garden, and attending to house projects as inspiration struck. Peter painted the kitchen ceiling, and eventually the kitchen cupboards, I cleaned out those cupboards and painted the bathroom. Cleaned out the basement bedroom and storerooms, and fixed door handles and evicted wasps from the chicken coop. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
Peter also dug in to work at RVC, I met girlfriends for coffee and/or a walk and became very familiar with the Denver Zoo. I bought a membership soon after we got to Denver – it’s a little less than a mile and a half from Laura’s house, so walking there, around the perimeter of the zoo, then out around the perimeter of City Park and a meandering route back added up to 5-6 miles. It was a lovely way to spend the mornings, especially as I got to know specific animals in the various exhibits and became increasingly invested in their welfare. Mahalo the Hippo was particularly dear – his keeper, Ben, was preparing him for transfer to a new site in Texas where he would have a more appropriately large habitat. Denver Zoo was in danger of not being re-accredited because of the inadequacy of his current digs, and Ben was spending hours acclimatizing him to his crate and spoiling him rotten (see mouth scratching and gum scraping). I was charmed by the porcupines and baby orangutan too and found myself intensely studying the Cape buffalo to try to distinguish each one by their horns. Other favorites were the otters and the gorillas, although after seeing the latter in the wild in Uganda it was painful to witness their captivity. As much as I loved the zoo I won’t renew my membership – descriptions of the zoo’s executive pay structure, particularly in contrast to the keepers’, made me loathe to add anything more to their obscenely large annual haul.
My friend Nicole and I joined the multitudes at The No Kings protest in Denver in mid June. When the political situation is dire, as it is now and as it dwarfs previous “dire” political situations in our country (can you believe how tame George W. appears in comparison?), it’s always helpful to attend a good old fashioned political protest. People of like mind all around, entertaining signs, and a reminder that our democracy can only be saved by those who insist it’s worth saving. (Over and over again.) On the one hand it was hard to believe we’re still having to protest anything – isn’t progress linear??! – but on the other it was as powerful a motivator as ever for staying engaged and loudly demanding better from our government.
In late June I spent a long weekend in Portland with Mia, who has been working at Nike since January ’24. She’s well settled with two housemates in a house in a hip neighborhood on the east side of Portland, and we spent an evening there before heading to the coast for a few days. It was as always glorious to see her and having her to myself for any amount of time – never mind days at a time – was more wonderful than ever. Since it will probably be another five years or more since that happens again, I made sure to take advantage of every minute.
We toured the Tillamook cheese factory, of course, but spent most of our time on the beaches and exploring the tide pools. When she was a little girl we introduced her to the wonders of tide pools in coastal Maine, and her curiosity still knows no bounds. She did have a mission however: we needed to find a nudibranch. And find it we did – cutest little nugget!
We hiked out along a peninsula with wonderful views of the coast, and I found myself assessing inlets and coves for anchoring, despite the boat being thousands and thousands of miles away. We were treated to a delicious brunch at Megan and Nolan’s on our way back into the city, with Strata by Nolan on the menu along with laughter and lots of love. The weekend went by way too quickly, but the joy of reconnecting with my daughter (as well as her cousin and her husband) was priceless.
The first of two memorials for my father was at the cottage in MN in mid-July and was well attended by extended family and friends from the Twin Cities. Seeing cousins for the first time in years (decades in a few cases) was heartening and all the stories people shared about Dad were in many cases hilarious and others heart-breaking. The ice cream barge added a sweet note and that night’s fireworks reminded us all that we were celebrating a life well lived, not mourning a loss.
We lost our mother’s brother, Mike Cashel, a couple of days before the memorial for Dad. A shock, given we were all very sure he was going to live forever, but we were all together to hear the news and grieve, and then celebrate him along with our father.
Time at the lake is always relaxing, and despite needing to attend to the logistics of the event we found this trip was no exception. We all enjoyed evenings on the patio, story time before bed for the great grandchildren, and trips around the lake on the pontoon. We drove back to Denver with Laura and settled back into her house for two more months, blissfully land-based.
The dog days of summer back in Denver passed in a blur of heat waves, occasional droplets of rain, hand watering the gardens, and emerging in the cool of the evenings to sit on the massive back deck and watch the afterglow of the sunsets on the clouds to the east. We drank a good deal of sauvignon blanc, and laughed even more, particularly when Laura’s neighbors, Francesca and Chris, popped across the alley and added to the merriment. We cooked good food and cuddled the animals and stretched out fully on our queen bed in the guestroom. It scratched every itch and made our return to the boat later in September a little easier to take.
But first, Bailey’s wedding! In a stroke of brilliance, Bailey and Michael married on a ranch outside of Salida, CO, and that meant we had to spend a long weekend in a beautiful little hotel in Salida. The wedding was gorgeous, the bride even more so, and the couple’s happiness pervaded every event before and after the I dos. It was a great opportunity to meet and get to know Michael’s family – and extended family – and hear the really good stories about Michael as he was growing up. Quinn and her partner Troy were a huge part of the party, and Peter’s mother Suzy and sister Brooke also attended, along with Brooke’s adult kids Erin and Al, and Erin’s husband Peter. More than the sum of their parts, they are without exception more fun than any family possibly could be – to a person whip smart, witty, caring, and unfailingly supportive. It was the best kind of catching up: lots of ribbing and hugs, vulnerability and probing questions, side eye and plenty of laughter. And dancing, lots of group dancing.
September also meant getting together all the boat parts and miscellaneous necessities to take back with us, and for me, doing my pool-based scuba classes and exam. As the lone participant in a “group” class with two instructors I got excellent training and enjoyed it all immensely. Planning to finish my certification with open water dives when we got to Bonaire in November just made it more exciting. As we counted down the days, Peter and I invested in scuba gear for the boat, then crammed it and everything else we’d amassed into four giant duffel bags. Francesca drove us to DIA early one morning, and I cried saying goodbye. Goodbye to a dear sister, a dear friend, to a welcoming home with nothing but open arms and wet noses (Laura has the open arms, the animals have the wet noses), and to a break from the boat that nurtured my body and soul. It was all hard to leave. However, adventure awaits.
Up Next: Back to the Boat