When I was a teenager, my family moved to the largest alpine valley in the world, the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, into a house that hadn’t been inhabited for many years. What appeared to be an insurmountable task, reclaiming the living space in an adobe shack, while we cooked outside and pumped water from a hand-pump, slowly became a passion. The old adobe had been built by a Japanese family many years before, and until we found it, had been a frequent gathering/party place for local teenagers. Infested with chipmunks from the attic to the floor, it began to take on a new life as we put in new floorcovering, and scrubbed and cleaned until we thought we’d die. By the time winter rolled around, we had moved in. It didn’t have a bathroom yet, so we endured an outhouse. Coming from southern New Mexico, we had no idea what 40 degrees below zero felt like, until that winter. Let’s just say if you left a shovel on the ground, you wouldn’t be using it until the Spring thaw, the ice was so thick. My siblings and I thought it was great, except for the outhouse part, and we spent many hours sliding around on Sangre de Cristo Creek, pretending we were ice skaters.
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