Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak. In the middle of February all of the world starts to feel drab. Even today, a rare warm and sunny day, the light breeze feels abrasive and yesterday’s snow settles into the road like wet concrete. Driving down a series of icy roads to the southern-most edge of Nederland, even the trees seem tired, the branches creaking as the ice and snow melts off. Passersby look at the forests with envy, wishing they too could shake the depth of winter from their bones.

But just on the edge of town is a little meadow that appears just a little sunnier than all the rest, about six acres of flat land bordered by a seasonal stream and a mountain rising like an auditorium, seats packed with aspens and pines. From where they sit, they can see a just-right brown house, 30 or so years old. But they are older, old enough to remember the house being built by the father or the son who would get married there, the son who would live there, the son who would have a daughter and a son of his own there.

Today though, Eric is at work, an arborist gone off to prune someone else’s trees. Inside, his wife, Anjaneya Grace Sardonicus Kennedy, sits looking out to the trees through a wall of wide south-facing windows, with her 18-month-old daughter, Grace, by her side. They’re watching for nothing in particular, for “Steller’s jays and woodpeckers and rabbits and squirrels and nuthatches and chickadees and magpies and deer and elk and foxes and coyotes and bears and moose,” Anjaneya saying the words, Grace making the requisite sounds. Meanwhile, the sun is busy filling their house with a warmth and humidity that feels downright defiant to the winter just on the other side of the glass.

The living room is filled with streams of golden light, illuminating the young family’s life like it was something to look at: a wooden rocking chair next to a wooden rocking horse, a regal looking globe with Africa turned upright, a bookshelf half-full of books and half-full of leather-bound journals, a dictionary six-inches thick opened to the letter “M.” All-in-all, the house is as exotic as the parade of wildlife outside. As if to prove its kinship with nature, the house’s walls are climbing with plants that aren’t supposed to grow in the mountains—succulents and ferns and tropical looking trees. Something about the wildness of the room makes a person feel like a kid again, the walls fading behind the plants as the room becomes a make-believe jungle.

The magic, the “something,” is Anjaneya herself. She’s effortless. Her manner so easygoing and mild that at times she appears statuesque, until that is, a smile spreads across her lips and shines through her eyes and you realize the blankness is there, as a canvas to be painted only with genuine expression. Her life philosophy expressed in her demeanor—what is real will come to the surface, whatever will be will be, que será será. To the onlooker, it’s a way of being that looks an awful lot like magic, but Anjanyea describes it simply as the way of things.

A Naropa trained early childhood educator, Anjaneya found her path when she was just 18 years old, back in New Hampshire, as a nanny reading Joseph Chilton Pearce’s book, The Magical Child. “From the very instant of birth,” Pearce writes, “the human child has only one concern: to learn all that there is to learn about the world. This planet is the child’s playground, and nothing should interfere with a child’s play.”

During her own development, from 18-year-old nanny to 30-year-old mom, Anjaneya took these words to heart to become an adult with a wisdom that can only be gleaned through a child’s eyes. Speaking simply about complex ideas, she talks about how she reads the world, observing physiologies to see the deep consciousness they reveal. As if on cue, 18-month-old Grace, who is still mostly wordless, looks up at her mother with eyes that mean to say something, and Anjaneya knows the little one has to pee. The two scurry off to the bathroom. Two children under her belt, and Anjaneya hasn’t used a single diaper.

For Anjaneya, who was called to work with children long before she had her own, the relationship with her children carries and added level of what she calls, “specialness.” Of course, Anjaneya feels a little extra pressure too, to not just be a mom, but be the mom she has studied to be, a self-conscious dance of observation, reflection and self-criticism. But in the motion of her footwork, Anjaneya is also noticeably present and aware, enjoying each step and every discovery, like a few weeks ago when she saw her daughter discover her own shadow. The light trickling in through the window, flickering on the bed, everything just right so little Grace could play with the difference between her dark and her light. One can only imagine how happy the trees outside were as they watched with Anjaneya, as life unfolded before their eyes.

Mountain Folk Tales is a weekly column about locals living along the Peak-to-Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.

(Originally published in the February 28, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)