Life, accelerated

Hello, dear ones!

There have been so many changes since the last update, I am exhausted even thinking about trying to detail them all. But I will try; I owe you all that. Here's a quick summary:

A month ago, after a little vacation in Summit County, feeling all caressed by cool, pine scented breeze, soothed by the Snake River running past our feet, all our worries evaporated by the incandescent mountain sunshine, we went back home to the oppressive summer heat in Loveland asking each other why we had left, and if we thought we would ever be back. We had some great years in Summit County. Popping out of the Eisenhower Tunnel and coasting down the west side of the continental divide still feels like coming home. It still feels strange to be in the county and drive right past Summit Cove, to no longer live in our double wide trailer house a few steps from National Forest trails, a few miles from skiing. It is sad how idle our bikes and skis, and my cross country skis have been since we left. Andy the dog languishes in the house or backyard, having to content himself with on-leash walks to the dog park instead of joyous explorations of forests, flopping down in icy streams when he gets hot, running and rolling in snow covered sagebrush in the winter. 

There are so many wonderful things in Loveland, a house with every kid's dream backyard, a sand box, play house and swing set under a wide, shady apple tree that the boys forage food from all day, amazing parks with running and spraying water, a truly laid back, incredibly supportive and nonjudgmental group of friends who share my hippie-dippie stuff and are up on the same gentle parenting philosophies I believe so strongly in. Our kids play together, exploring and learning without a lot of adult intervention, and it is so amazing to see and experience them interacting with their environment together. My village in Loveland is amazing. But it wasn't as though we had a great job keeping us in Loveland. And it really seemed, just by talking to the few people we recognized around town that weekend, like work in Summit County would not be hard at all to come by. Everyone we talked to seemed enthusiastically supportive, telling us crazy tales of needing work done in homes and second homes, and calling all the contractors they knew of, and either not being called back, or being called back only to be put on a wait list. Which is the opposite of Loveland, where we have found some decent work through word of mouth advertising, but finding work the regular way, marketing and advertising, ads in phone books and newspapers, social media and websites meant joining the cacophony of similar contractors all clamoring and competing for the same jobs. We know or have only a degree or two of separation from the entire workforce of Summit County. Plus we aren't regular users of medicinal or recreational marijuana. Which, now that it is legal, is both a wonderful and terrible thing for the professionals in mountain towns. It has brought money and people to Colorado (Loveland included, but Summit County has always been more 420 friendly, the high altitude and easy going local atmosphere more inviting to that particular population than the city bustle) and everything, especially housing, is seeing the effects of it. In five years, housing has jumped 30-40%.  

Knowing nothing would come of it if no affordable housing could be found, we casually asked around to see if perhaps we could find some work around Keystone the rest of the summer. We even went so far as to swallow our pride and contact the company we used to work for in Summit County, offering to bid any pre season maintenance or upgrades that might need to be completed in their condos and houses before the busy ski season hit. When they told us they had it covered with a full time maintenance contractor, we shrugged and carried on with our odd-jobbing in Loveland. 

Wednesday before last, they called with an offer- if Bobby could come up two days per week, they would hire him those two days to cover for the full time maintenance person, to give the existing help a five day workweek instead of seven days. We agreed to try to make it work, although we were not sure exactly how we would pull it off- if we could manage to rent a little place for him to stay or if he might couch surf with friends. Friends offered, eager to help us, our village still there for us even after five years away, so we committed to it through the winter and began tossing around the idea of simply renting out our house in Loveland and moving to Summit County, finding the same sort of work we were doing in Loveland using our old contacts in the county for references. It would be a big leap of faith, considering that the two days a week guaranteed work plus our Loveland rental income would only barely cover our rent and nothing else. I wrote a letter describing the sort of cleaning and maintenance services we provide, and emailed it to a bunch of Keystone homeowners, hoping a few might be tired of managing their VRBO condos themselves, and also tired of hiring a full-on management company, and looking for the sort of niche private services we could offer. Most were not interested, but a few responded favorably. No sooner had we committed to meeting a few of them, then last Friday happened. Friday morning, out of the blue, our old company's full time maintenance contractor resigned, leaving his work uncompleted and his job wide open. Bobby was the first person they called. And suddenly, there is more work to do than time to do it in.

It is actually pretty ideal. I love Bobby, so I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, but he's a less than awesome manager. Bless his hardworking heart, delegating is truly difficult for him. He would rather do things himself, and do them right the first time, than be the bad guy and send an employee back three times to train them to do it right. So the offer of returning to his old job, minus the management part of it, is actually really perfect for him. Especially since the pay is the same as when he was managing in addition to running around doing maintenance and customer service. He knows exactly how to do his job, what is required of him, and has years of familiarity with the properties- which ones freeze up and where, what the recurring problems are, where to tell guests to park, which complaints to head off at the pass. He isn't learning a new job or trying to get a read on a new boss. No, we won't do quite as well up here this time around as we did before, because I won't be able to work more than part part-time for a few more years yet thanks to the babies, but for Bobby, it is a job with some degree of self-management, the freedom that as long as the work gets done, he has the option to bring Daniel along, come home for lunch or a quick bike ride or ski run on quiet days when the phone isn't ringing, and it is job security. As long as ski guests come to Summit County, they will break the condos they stay in. This much has been proven in the 25 years this company has been serving ski guests.

We left this job because Bobby burned out. Managing it was a lot for him. Being yelled at every day by guests was uniquely unsuited for his personality, being the responsible one, the middle child, the pleaser. I watched his hair turn gray and saw him stop caring about doing fun things, his world shrinking to work and sleep when everything depended on him. Five years ago, when I saw his eyes light up at the thought of spending his days by himself in a manure truck making better money than he was making getting yelled at all day, I supported him completely. I encouraged him to make the change, in spite of it meaning that we leave the beautiful high Rockies we had come to love so much. I redirected my mountain biking and skiing energy into making babies and growing food. 

In the five years since, we have had to admit a hard truth: the lodging company was a good fit for us. We shouldn't have waited until management burnout was so complete we didn't have the energy to fix the issues, when the only solution we saw was to jump ship. We should have negotiated, Bobby should have asked to be relieved of his management responsibilities and simply done what he does best- the actual work. 

The first year and a half after leaving Summit County, we saw some really good times. We had Daniel. We made more money that year than we expected. But then it stopped. And in the four years since our good year, there have been times we have scratched our heads and asked, "when did everything get so hard?" It was almost as if everything we tried that wasn't the Summit County lodging company just fought us, and we realized we had it better there than we thought, and regretted not fighting harder to stay there. 

And what do you know. In a week and a half, Bobby has scared up more work in Summit County than he did in months down in the northern Front Range. 

Looking for apartments the last week and a half, we found nothing but dead ends. A few places were promising if we didn't have a dog, but we realized most of our income would be going to rent. Our new-again boss rented us a small condo month-to-month until Thanksgiving, with the agreement that since we were not paying top dollar or committing to any time frame, we would "float", being ready to move to another empty condo if the one we were in was booked by a higher paying guest. 

We applied to rent another trailer house in the Summit Cove trailer park, which is the county's only truly affordable housing, only to be told we were applying for the last available lot along with about four other people, and someone had submitted an application for it five minutes before us. The trailer park was our last hope for housing we could make work long-term. My parents agreed to keep to dog all winter, if needed, to allow us to keep working and possibly get a six-month, no-pets-allowed rental, so we could keep the job through the winter and figure our stuff out. 

We started looking for a six month rental we could afford, while living for the moment in a condo at the base of Keystone, only steps from the ski lifts, in a little corner of Keystone that is silent and abandoned right now, just us and the rustling aspens. The area will be expensive, teeming and busy in a few months when snow is on the mountain and the lifts are turning. "Stay calm", we told each other. "If it's meant to be, it will be. If we can't find anything before Thanksgiving, when we can no longer bounce around ski condos, we'll go back to Loveland, and we won't have lost anything except time. And a job. Which is not possible to keep anyway if we don't live here."

Yesterday, the trailer park called back. "You application was approved first", they said. "This puts you at the top of the waiting list. Do you want the trailer and lot?" 

We raced to Summit Cove to look at it. It is a small 3/2, much smaller than the one we lived in five years ago, but almost 30 years newer, with no obvious reasons we wouldn't be okay living there. Not fancy, certainly not roomy, but a roof over our heads. And just like that, feeling a little guilty that we landed it instead of the herd of other applicants, but also feeling a little like we won the lottery, it is ours to live in. Housing has suddenly gone from impossible to find to completely covered. How we got ahead of the other people in line for it, we are not sure. But we'll take it. I guess we just expected to be the bug. Being the windshield caught us off guard. 

If we can rent our house for the going rate in Loveland, a going rate that is the reason we were forced to keep the failing oilfield job just long enough to be allowed to sign away the next thirty years of our lives to a mortgage there (rent is crazy there, too, at the moment), we can cover most of our rent here. Which means it will actually be cheaper to live here than in Loveland. And Bobby has a full time job here. So within two weeks, completely without warning, we have leapt off square one and shot, as if from a cannon, into our future's trajectory. 

Or not. If we have learned anything these last few years, it is that anything can change at any time. We are only ever a breath, a phone call, a right or left turn away from everything changing massively, for the better or for the worse. We duck, we bob, we jab, and when we take a punch, we roll. As long as we have each other, and you, our amazing intentional family, our village, there isn't really any change so big we can't take a breath, clear our heads, wrap our minds around it, and set off in a brand new direction toward amazing new possibilities.

Which brings us to tonight. For the first time since I got here Saturday night, I left the kids with Bobby and went for a hike all by myself. It took about ten minutes for the mountain high to kick in. I felt invincible, relaxed, and ecstatic for no particular reason. Just me, the squirrels, a red fox I surprised, the setting sun sending flaming arms into the sky above the pines and aspens that reached friendly arms toward me to welcome me back. I have been embarrassingly stressed out and short tempered out all week. I have been bogged down in details. I have been mother to a 'roided out three year old and a clingy sixteen month old, bouncing around a ski condo that is incredibly non-child friendly, trying and failing to keep them from trashing it and breaking things. But until tonight, I haven't simply been. When I finally left the babies in the condo with Bobby and wandered under the pine trees for an hour, I realized I've lost that loving feeling, running around being adulty, but tonight, I got it back  for awhile. That feeling is what Summit County is to me. 

We are leaving the city. This is bittersweet. The city has been good to us. Our friends and neighbors there have become family. But as these two little boys get bigger, I am excited that they will do so as woodland wanderers, speaking the language of the forest- silence that isn't silent and solitude that isn't alone. I grew up in the grassland and river breaks surrounding the dry Smoky Hill River, embraced by the earth, wind and grass as it has been for millennia. Maybe it was the lonely spaces, the big sky, that formed my preferences as an adult. The mountains are everything I loved, in addition to everything I missed in the flatlands. I want them to grow up loving the same things I did. 

Life is surprising. Two and a half weeks ago, we were still trying to decide what to do with ourselves, in our lovely little Loveland house on our little Loveland cul de sac. Now we have a full time job and a house in Summit County. Didn't see that one coming.