We'll spread Peggy's ashes tomorrow morning

Flagstaff Mountain, overlooking Boulder, is restricted to local traffic due to wildfires. It's where we'd originally planned to spread Peg's ashes. I think Plan B is a blessing.

Brainard Lake is where she loved to hike with her longtime friend Leann, who suggested this might be a beautiful place to spread her ashes. This will be the final resting place for the wisps of ancient stardust that comprised Peggy Smith's body.

Peg's Colorado Memorial next Saturday, July 7

Here are the details for the gathering to remember Peggy and celebrate her life.  It's an informal get-together at the home of her sister, Marianne Taras:

8842 Eagle's Nest Lane
Highlands Ranch, Colorado 80126

Saturday, July 7, 2012
1-4pm

There will be refreshments and light snacks. If you know someone who might want to come, please share this blog with them.

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Something I'd put off thinking about--until two days ago-- was how, when and where to scatter Peg's ashes. Our friend Diane knows a place not far from Boulder, where Peg went to college. It's up the side of Flagstaff Mountain, a place with a beautiful view of the valley. It's also a place that's clearly marked for anyone to return to and know they're in the right spot.

We haven't finalized the details, but it'll be around midday or early afternoon this coming Tuesday, July 3rd. I'll post the specifics before we leave for Denver on Sunday.

This photo was taken in front of Ruth and Joe Piper's getaway cabin, a place Peggy loved and returned to many times in college and beyond. She and I stayed there for two days after our wedding. Peg cleaned Ruth's house in college and she became sort of an "adopted grandmother." Peg was the only one outside of Ruth's family who had permission to stay there. I thought about scattering her ashes there...but Peg loved so many places in the Rockies. Whenever we'd drive past the foothills west of Denver and started seeing the peaks soaring above the treeline, she would put her hand to her heart and tell me again how this was home to her. Every place she walked--from Steamboat Springs to Marble to the Maroon Bells, Eldora to Estes Park, Independence Pass, Bailey, Durango--was, for her, sacred ground.

There will be a specific spot where Peg's physical remains will be scattered. But her heart was, and forever will be, everywhere in her beloved Rocky Mountains.

Peg's garden without Peg

Volunteer kale in front of the steps, right in the middle of the pathway. Something purple and pretty growing randomly where it's finding water from the drip irrigation system. That's our "vegetable garden" this summer.

Where there was zucchini and hat squash, there are fragrant alyssum and nasturtiums. And random plants that are fun and interesting, though they very well be weeds for all I know. The strawberries are going great guns, but it looks like the squirrels and various critters will partake before the fruit's on our radar. The entire garden has literally gone to seed.

No tomatoes for the first time in several years. Zoë and I won't be around enough this summer to harvest them, and I think it's too late to plant them anyway. This was Peg's world...she knew so much about what to plant, and when, and had an orderly arrangement for the whole garden. Last summer we harvested the things she'd lovingly planted almost every day.

A year later, nothing has been planted. Nothing to pull out of the ground. But there is a quiet peacefulness in just letting the garden rest this year, as plants go to seed and volunteers pop up. I let the peas run rampant over the herb garden because the fragrance was so wonderful. I love seeing the nasturtiums appear randomly wherever they find root.

The harvest this year is the appreciation of the beauty of this space, and the wonder of how life continues to grow in unexpected places.

Love after Love

Still going through hundreds of bits of Peg's life. A photo slipped into a book. Receipts from a thousand years ago. Cryptic notes in her frequently undecipherable shorthand.

This was taken in May 1984 (I know this because Peg compulsively wrote dates, locations and the subject on the back of almost every photo). Today I ran across the photo and a Derek Walcott poem she had framed on the wall of her office, where her patients would always see it:

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here.  Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.  Feast on your life.

Spontaneous creation

Hired someone to fix the pocket door in the middle bathroom, which has been half-broken for over ten years. Today he had a doctor's appointment.

Zoë and I decided, since Russ had taken the day off, to paint the middle bathroom.  It's been a bland grey for over 20 years...nondescript, "acceptable," ...meh.  She said, "Hey...what if it was an electric blue?"

We picked out some swatches, brought them home, and within five minutes were drawn to this wondrous shade of blue. Tonight we have a new bathroom. It was over 100 degrees in Sacramento, a perfect day to be inside and do something fun with the music cranked up to eleven. Makes me happy every time I walk through the bathroom into the kitchen and see this glorious, vibrant color that we collaborated on.

New color. New life. Good stuff.

Peggy's Colorado memorial

We're having a get-together at Marianne's house on Saturday, July 7, the day before Zoë and I return to California. Everyone is welcome. I'll post the details later, but it'll be pretty low-key and informal....kinda like Peg.

Her heart was firmly rooted in the Rockies. We haven't sorted out how and where, but we'll take her ashes deep into the mountains during our trip and leave them there as she asked us to do.

Hard to believe we leave in less than two weeks. Zoë reminded me that as much as she was looking forward to driving a convertible through the mountains, you're not allowed to drive a rental car if you're under 21.

I told her that we'd evaluate the consequences vs. the joy. I'm guessing the consequences are zip and the joy is immense. We'll be enjoying the fireworks in Aspen on July 4th, even if we have to sleep in the car. A real Colorado adventure.

Back from the beach

First Father's Day as a single dad. First camping trip with just the two of us. Life goes forward.

Spent the first night near Fort Bragg, at a private campground that's one of the few places left in California where you can camp on the beach. Zoë set up her one-girl tent just100' from the surf.

Patrick's Point was sunny but cool (as opposed to Sacramento, which was 110 degrees yesterday). Four wonderful days with Paul and Chris Andre and their two daughters, hunting for agates on the beach and enjoying each others' company. After the many camping trips our two families have shared, it was a real shift not having Peggy there...but we will never forget those memories, even as we move on and create new ones.

This is so Zoë, nimbly creating her own resting place in the cleft of a rock, spontaneously and without instruction. Finding balance and joy in a hard place.