Sarah Haas, Nederland.  A weekly column about locals along the Peak-to-Peak.

Jessie Ansari sits in the Train Cars with donuts, a lollipop, and a hot chocolate laid out in front of her two-year-old daughter. “I’m gonna regret this in two hours,” she says, eyeing the sugary lineup. We talk for a bit while Esme goes about finally figuring out how many licks it actually takes to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop, until she finally gives up and holds up a book instead, chanting “Read! Read! Read!”

Ansari smiles and opens Bugs Bunny’s Carrot Machine: “Whoa Wabbit what’s the wush?” she says in a perfect Elmer Fudd.

“Look what I found in an old magazine!” Bugs replies. “The plans for building a carrot machine!”

From here on out storytime serves as the commercial breaks to our conversation, Ansari talking about life in Nederland since she moved here in 2012, then a page of Bugs Bunny, then back to how her one acre lot off Magnolia feels more like home than anywhere she’s ever lived. Growing up in the UK I doubt she ever imagined she’d end up in the Colorado mountains, let alone that she’d be a linchpin of Nederland’s community.

Ansari either has been or is involved with just about every nonprofit in town, having worked at the Community Center, the Visitor’s Center and now chairing the Mountain Forum for Peace and running the Gillespie House.

She loves being active in her community and describes it as a “lifeline” in the mountains. I imagine Ansari sitting across from Regis Philbin on “Who Wants to Be a Milllionarie,” deciding who to call when he asks her, “How do you save your sanity after making animal noises with your two-year-old for a week straight?”

A) Encourage your daughter to sound like a rabbit (they don’t make any noise)

B) Join NedMammas

C) Get involved in town doing what you love

According to Bugs Bunny the answer is: (D) Make a Carrot Machine, and he asks Elmer Fudd for a little help.

“I’ll be glad to so long as it keeps you out of my garden!” Fudd replies.

With her husband, Khurrum, gone at work most of the day, Ansari and Esme have plenty of time to make carrot machines, chop wood, and use the table saw she got for her birthday to turn felled trees into tables.

“You have to have a stripe of independence to live up here, an alternative way of thinking about things, to be able to turn trash into treasure. It’s one of the things I love most about the people here, especially the women, how creative and self-reliant we have to be,” she says, making a little bicep curl that elicits a chuckle from Esme, who’s waiving the book in the air.

“Bugs and Elmer found an old boiler and filled it with junk and carried it to Elmer’s backyard,” Ansari reads. “There they set to work building the carrot machine.”

“I wonder if this cwazy thing will work?”

Up here anything is possible, but sometimes all a day calls for is a simple enjoyment of the outdoors. The Ansari family is built on a love of nature, it’s one of the reasons Jessie and her husband fell in love, why they moved to Nederland and why they’ll stay forever.

“When I first moved to town, people would always ask what church I went to and I’d say “outside, with the trees. They’re sacred, you know, and humbling,” she says, adding that the feeling she gets from the forests is similar to the ones she’d get from old churches back in Europe.

Not that the buildings here are any less impressive, they weather winds and storms unimaginable unless you’ve stood against them, and when paired with the natural splendor of the Peak-to-Peak, Ansari says they feed her imagination for what it is that makes this place what it is.

“The interesting thing about history here is that everything burns, and cyclically towns have to start over and over,” she says. “If you look at old pictures of Nederland it’s totally unrecognizable from today. Like, there used to be a dance hall that extended over the reservoir… Can you imagine how wild that must have been with all the miners literally dancing over the water at the end of the day?”

Here one day, gone the next — just like the inevitable explosion of Bugs and Elmer’s carrot machine — a haunting phenomenon for some but for Ansari one of life’s wonderful aspects. She looks down at Esme and tells me a story about when she was a girl, 7 years-old, and cast in an experimental play her father was directing.

Dressed in a flowing, black, Victorian dress, she stood at center stage with a spotlight shining down upon her, the apparition of a ghost of one’s past. She might not have known it then, but she was getting an early education in the cyclical way of things, one that would instill a hardy appreciation in Ansari for life, just as it is.

“Now you’ve done it you gweedy wabbit! You’ve overloaded the carrot machine!” Elmer stared down at the pieces of junk. But, to Bugs Bunny’s delight, they had fallen to the ground in the shape of an arrow, pointing right to Elmer’s carrot patch.

To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.