Peg's ashes: where to find the spot

https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&q=40.071070,-105.591067+(Peggy)

Or, enter the following latitude / longitude coordinates in a GPS navigator for location:

Lat: 40.071070
Long: -105.591067

It's a beautiful walk to a beautiful spot, next to the little creek that flows into Long Lake. It's about 30 feet off the main path toward the lake.

Tour de Colorado

This is the Batmobile, the Mustang convertible we've been flogging all over the state. We only put the top up to lock it up for the night.  Zoë is my DJ, providing the soundtrack for our travels through her iPod. She's a fun traveling companion.

We did an early evening hike in the Maroon Bells near Aspen, one of Peg's favorite spots on earth. She was very much on our minds...but, as you can see, we always pack our silliness as a companion for our solemnity.

Tomorrow we'll do a longer hike there, then head over Independence Pass and back to Denver.

Ashes in the mountains

We hiked in about half a mile in the mountains above Nederland to a place called Long Lake (Leann and husband Pete, Kent and wife Diane and their two youngest, Zoë and me). Just below a field of wildflowers, beside a swiftly-flowing stream is where I spread Peggy's ashes.

It's a place Peg probably loved the many times she hiked this area in college.

My hands were shaking as I opened the box. Another emotional hurdle. So thankful our friends, who were so close to Peg for so many years, were there with us.

The grey powder that was Peggy's body, cast in and near the stream, will eventually wash into the lake and become softly embedded into the silt. A final rest after a long, tiring journey.

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.