Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.   Some places along the Peak to Peak are easy to identify: Nederland, Central City, Allenspark, and in speaking their names we conjure them. Others though are less defined, existing between our monikers and inside the big, amorphous and green patches on our maps. Neither here nor there we talk about these places by their position to landmarks, for example, as Brigette DeMink Johnson says, “We live off East Magnolia.”

To know a place like this, by its relationship to another, is like knowing oneself by the company one keeps, as if a mother is best defined by her children or a wife by her husband. Such referential descriptions account, in part, for who a person is, but they do not tell the whole story.

Which is not to say it’s dishonest to describe the Johnson family home as off of East Magnolia or west of a rock outcropping, but just to point out that a lot is hidden by omission, like how the morning shadows cast by the rocks cool the house’s porch before it’s ready. Or that, since the Johnson family moved in two and a half years ago, the house has been slowly changing from earth toned to rainbow colored. If the house could speak, it would tell you, simply, that it’s turning the color of Brigette’s soul.

As a mother of five, Brigette is used to answering to “Mom.” As 25 years the wife of Bryce, she is a very happy wife. And, as the foster parent to an endless stream of pets (currently six dogs, but previously seven rats, 150 chickens, four Muscovy ducklings, two Nigerian pygmy goats who became three, a dozen rabbits and three turkeys), she’s used to being covered in some kind of animal excrement or another. But if Brigette could tell you who she is, she’d probably say, “I’m a woman with a heart that always has room for one more.”

Brigette was born in California to a faithful family and her father, as if to deal directly with Pentecostal flames, made his living as a firefighter. But the family was less known by what they did for work than what they did in-between, picking up hitchhikers and opening their home to families in need. It was their virtues that led them out of California and toward Colorado Springs, where Brigette’s father went to school to become a minister, although he would never don the trade’s pastoral robes. He, like his daughter, was content to live with God and according to his wisdoms.
When Brigette was 14, the family moved again, settling close to their original home in the Midwest. Poor, the family who had sheltered so many, needed to borrow another’s basement, and grandma was happy to have her flock back in her stead. Located in a rough and tumble neighborhood, Brigette the skinny white girl, spent her most impressionable teenage years wearing corn rows from a culture she would come to think of as her own. But still, she didn’t quite belong.

Brigette would spend the next 10 years searching for herself. Without kids or a husband, she had only her own bliss to follow. First it led her to a wedding dress shop where she would work with a wealthy Jewish woman and a bombastic black man who dressed, always, in drag. Then, at just 21 years old, she taught a college program in the business of fashion. By age 22, she was running an entire department for a Midwest clothing company, making regular trips to 1990s New York where the streets were still grimy but the clothing was always refined. All the while, Brigette was smiling, savoring the life she never could have predicted but accepted at every step along the way.

She never saw the benchmark moments coming, few us ever do, and a year after marrying her husband, when she 30 years old and nine months pregnant, she went to work on Friday, had the baby on Saturday and on Sunday started life anew. She would never go back to work again, at least not in the traditional sense, and although it would take time to adjust to being a stay-at-home-mom, she knew right away it was exactly what she was meant to do.

Both her born babies and her adopted ones would come to her in ways unimaginable, and as they grew into people of their very own, Brigette found herself both surprised by and grateful for the humans she was getting to spend her life with. Together, the family would go on to innumerable adventures, the pinnacle of which (at least so far) would be moving to a little house off of East Magnolia just two and half years ago.
At first the silence and serenity scared her. With a home that was always full, Brigette has learned to find peace inside of chaos, rarely knowing it on its own terms. But on these winter weekday mornings, when the kids are off to school and Bryce is gone to work, even the foster dogs seem happy to take a moment for silence and a minute to get back in touch with who they are when no else is around.

In these quiet moments Brigette, with a soul the color of the rainbow, is known to pick up a paintbrush and a can of bright red, yellow, blue or green, and paint a part of her house so that it matches the vibrancy of her soul.

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 December 13, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)