Rambling Post Starting at My Front Door

Martha Kennedy 26 Comments

The first time I saw my front door, I said, “Hey, how about that one?” and Lois and I went on down the road. My realtor said “No. It’s on a highway. I’m not showing it to you. You won’t like it. “

She’s THAT kind of friend. BUT as time passed she did show me the house. We both fell in love with it, recognized immediately that it was my house, and now I live in it. She visits me. 🙂

If you look out my front door, you see US HWY 160, some houses built between the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, and some built in the fifties. Mine was built in 1928.

Google street apparently passed by in late summer 2018

Hwy 160 is pretty interesting. After Memorial Day, it’s a bumper-to-bumper parade of Texans with big RVS pulling at least one additional vehicle, all heading to the mountains. After Labor Day the parade slows down and in winter it’s a quiet street in a small town. In spring — pretty soon — local ranchers will be hauling their stock up to higher pastures, and I’ll wake up to the aroma of mobile feedlots. My dog, Dusty T. Dog (RIP), loved horses and if a trailer with horses went by, he was so happy, thinking, I guess, that his pal from California, Brownie T. Horse was nearby.

A few times a year the high school marching band practices on the streets around my house. The high school band consistently wins national awards.

Monte Vista is the home of the oldest professional rodeo in Colorado, and when the Stampede hits town (it’s a weekend of rodeo, fair rides, music shows and two parades) my street has a legit parade. In summer noisy groups of happy kids also go by morning and afternoon, coming from a summer kids’ program to the local park which is a block away from my house.

Life in a small town.

When I first moved here, I stood outside one rainy night and looked down the street toward the east. I felt so happy because my street looked like my favorite neighborhood in Denver. It still does, but now I know my town and some of the people in it, it looks less like any other place and more like itself.

If you go out into my yard and look west you see the San Juan Mountains. Covered with snow most of the winter, they are beautiful ALL the time but especially at sunrise with the morning alpenglow. Sunsets are also amazing (see above).

A lot of other people have lived in my house. I think about that sometimes. If the walls could talk they could tell me. Once when the furnace acted up, Mike Medina, the heating guy, went into the crawl space and found a couple potato sacks from the 1940s. He asked if I wanted them, and I let him take them home. His dad used to work potatoes (people here work potatoes) and who knows? Maybe the pictures on the sacks were from some of the old companies where Mike’s dad worked.

My house is an extension of me. Long, long ago when I first got out of a horrible marriage and had my first OWN place, I understood the meaning of “home.” I remember the day I opened my then front door and came into my apartment knowing he would not be back. It was MINE. It was my space in which I could do whatever I wanted. I married a couple of times since then and lived in sin with the Evil X (the sin was living with the Evil X; anyone else might not have been sin). Ultimately it always came down to wanting my own front door with my own space and life behind it.

I probably never married the right guy.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/ragtag-daily-prompt-thursday-looking-out-of-my-front-door/

26 thoughts on “Rambling Post Starting at My Front Door”

  4. Looks like a nice little cottage. I do like your front space: enclosed, shrubs, green – you could “easily” plant perennials in that little space. Nice post.

  5. Love this, Martha. I remember after I had lived in an apartment here in sunny FL for a couple years and thinking, ‘This is nuts. I’m wasting my money.’ So I bought a house. My parents freaked out. What’s a single girl doing buying a house?! Because just what you said: It was MINE.

    • I didn’t want to buy a house EVER. But the second X had an existential meltdown over home ownership when he was 40 and we bought a crack house in a “hood.” That thing I didn’t want to do turned out to be the best thing I could have done.

  8. Really wonderful post – I kept thinking of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” with your story being the expansion to a House of One’s Own. (I’ve never had a house for myself, but I finally do have that room – as an adult – and it is indeed glorious) To have a house with a long history of its own – even better!

      • Same here. As the oldest of 5, I was raised to believe I was selfish if I didn’t share anything and everything. Space included. I agree with you – everyone needs personal space, no matter what the age.

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