Every day I pick up the kids from their new mountain school (it’s K-12 and maybe 300 students?), I pass a massive carcass decomposing along the side of the road. Maybe a cow or a bear? I’m not sure. But the thing I find fascinating—and oh-so- delightful—is that it’s remained on there long enough to rot. No well-intentioned citizen has called the Division of Wildlife to remove the unsightly skeleton. Everyone in this little town seems content enough to let the poor beast rot in peace.
Within the two short months we’ve lived here, I’ve grown more accustomed to seeing guts and bones. Piles of intestines have frequently appeared on our porch, dirt driveway, and grassy, unkempt fields. By mid-morning, they’re swarming with an assortment of flies and flesh-eating bees (why did I never learn about Vulture Bees in school?? SOOOO interesting!!), and by early evening, all traces of the shiny, coiled intestines have been efficiently consumed.
Speaking of guts and carcasses, I’ve started the strange habit of collecting bones as we walk our property, and have amassed a small mound on the ledge of my back porch. While this ossuary of sorts might seem grotesque to many, it constantly reminds me of death’s ever- potential nearness. I find myself increasingly grateful for every glorious breath I’m allowed.
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Back in Windsor, the city we moved from, I used to audibly groan whenever so my phone would vibrate up with a “Next-Door Neighbor” alert. Even so, I read them all the same.
One time, a guy ranting over the “dog poop” that covered the golf course, only to be duly chastised by the manager that the green logs were, in fact, goose pellets, and not much could be done to control the wild geese. (I’m sure there were quite a few people who might have favored shooting the birds rather than permit their precious golf course to be littered with feces).
Sneakily snapped photographs often popped up on the neighborhood app, intended to shame the lazy dog-walkers who didn’t utilize the free doggie bags provided along the way. The captions always read something like, “PICK UP YOUR PET’S POOP!!! WE’RE WATCHING YOU!!!” in all capital letters, with no less than three exclamation marks.
I get it—no one wants to step in a pile of poop while jogging in the morning, and it’s certainly in poor taste not to clean up after your pet, especially in public places. I just always found people’s extreme rage amusing, along with the looong thread of comments that ensued, and I constantly questioned how people had so much time and energy to expend on a couple pieces of poop.
I laughingly wonder how they would have responded to guts?
All this to say, my favorite, favorite, favorite thing about now living in the mountains is the imperfections.
Down in town, very few cars are ever squeaky clean because it rains—a lot—and almost everyone seems to live off of one dirt road or another. Sometimes, a lone dog wanders around the main street because, well, who knows why, and occasionally, they even poop! But I’ve yet to witness someone snap a photo to shame their neighbor. No one shakes their head or clucks their tongue over the poor, impoverished animal whose owner clearly doesn’t deserve their furry friend. Perhaps due to the generous population of deer and elk that roam the valley, people here understand that, once in a while, animals poop.
Additionally, scattered across the face of every mountain, dead trees lie crisscrossed wherever they’ve fallen. Even so, no HOA committee seems to be sending out notifications requiring the owners to clean up their yard. Weeds—even noxious ones—sprout up abundantly amidst the vibrant wildflowers. But to my knowledge, no board is being formed to address this earth-shattering problem, and I feel free to cherish the beauty of even the weeds.
Our new house has woodpecker holes in the cedar siding, and while not idyllic, we’ve accepted it for the time being as our reality. Additionally, our house has no gutters, so the afternoon rains careen down the metal roof without impediment and free fall to the soft, dark earth, resulting in slightly grooved trenches.
“Maybe we will add gutters,” Arin muses, then quietly rescinds, “or maybe we won’t.”
Here, there is an observed synergy between nature and people that is so easy to forget in more populated, “civilized” areas. Animal poop fertilizes the earth. Rodents run rampant, but their flesh provides food for larger animals, and their innards nourish the smaller ones. Trees fall, dirt makes things dirty, and none of these things, although acknowledged and addressed, seem gripe-worthy on “Next-Door Neighbor,” if the app even covers our new little town.
Ironically, the things that are, perhaps, fit to be posted on social media are calmly accepted with a simplicity that I find both foreign and fascinating.
Our neighbor across the way informed us that a woman was found chopped up approximately a mile-and-a-half up the road a few years ago. He sees bears and mountain lions all the time. These events, he shares matter-of-factly, as it were somehow less of a crisis than golf-course dog poop, and something about his calmness simultaneously amazes me and sits just right in my soul.
When we first moved here, Arin used to grow flustered by the uncontrollable afternoon rains that interfered with his outdoor work plans. Now, he just looks to the darkening sky as his signal to rest, and rather than shaking his fist at the gathering clouds, he comes in for our afternoon cup of coffee, and we head for the porch to watch the storm.
As dramatic or cliché as it may sound, it feels acceptable to just BE for the first time in my life. This place, this air, gives me the courage to be me, to neither despise nor celebrate my imperfections, but to simply permit them to exist. It’s emboldened me to aggressively tackle the issues that I wish to conquer (like my fears) while exposing the “dog poops” I wasted so much energy fretting over (like the gray hairs that keep sprouting from my head faster than the purple musk thistle on our mountain).
As seemingly trite as hair is, it’s consumed much of my recent thoughts. I’ve religiously colored my grays for as long as I can remember. But somehow, up here, it doesn’t seem so unthinkable that a woman under the age of sixty might choose to “grow out her roots.” I been thinking on a quote I recently read by an older woman concerning her graying hair. “It’s not so much about letting yourself go, as it is about letting yourself be.”
I contemplate the way I’ve promised myself to age gracefully, how I’ve preached it to my girls, admired the trait in my husband—and recognize my potential hypocrisy. Turning my thoughts to our property, I consider my reticence to use commercial weed killer on land so pristine, and then ponder my willingness to marinate my own scalp in such harsh chemicals month after month.
What if I gave myself—and my hair—the permission to JUST BE?
A smattering of wiry, gray hairs seems to be surfacing some fairly big questions.
In Wayne Muller’s excellent book, A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough, he talks about a geological term called Isostasis, which refers to the idea that when something in nature is removed, another is free to grow in its place.
What if I removed my expectations of what I should do, of who I should be? What would be free to grow in its place? What if I learned to just accept instead of always trying to manage and control? What if, instead of fighting against nature, I became a calm, willing, and thankful participant?
These thoughts ramble around in my head, and I feel free to let them percolate—unresolved— and with every passing day, my gray hairs grow longer and more noticeable.
What if I look old? Ugly? What if my husband no longer finds me attractive?
My thoughts bombard me like an internal HOA board, “Clean up your yard! You must be manicured and pristine, or we will fine you!”
But then I lift my eyes to the surrounding mountains, I open my ears to the chattering locusts and swarming flies, and there is something about the wilderness around me that makes my own chaotic wildness feel slightly more acceptable. I’ve always been a rule follower and a people pleaser…to a certain point. But there’s also been a latent wildness that I’ve fiercely protected and allowed to remain subdued, partially out of self-preservation, and partly due to my fears and insecurities.
However, there’s something about riding a magnificent horse outdoors, where mountains erupt from the earth on all sides, that makes it slightly harder to suppress everything I feel, to tamp down the woman I’m becoming; besides, I’m running out of reasons not to be fully me. I’m so in love with the life we’re creating that I find I want to be fully present in my own skin instead of escaping my one, wild ride of a life.
Arin and I were talking yesterday about the idea that when you live in nature, surrounded by God’s handiwork versus man’s concrete jungle, something begins working on you from the outside in. Your efforts become multiplied almost magically by something beyond yourself, and for us, something about this whole moving process feels like we are no longer fighting against the goads but being lifted up and carried along a current higher and greater than ourselves.
I fall asleep every night, insanely proud of the fears and hurdles we’ve fought through—and continue to fight throughy—to be here in the mountains, living our best life. Certainly, it’s not been without many trials and tribulations, but rather, because of them that we’ve landed where we are, and this, I suppose, is a bit like my gray hairs. They are a part of me, whether I want to acknowledge them or not.
Perhaps it has come time to just let them—and myself—simple be.
