Dear Mountain Folk Tales reader,

It’s 2019 and with the New Year finally upon us I’m sitting down to write you a letter I’ve been meaning to write, one of reflection and gratitude, although it’s not turning out the way I intended.

I wanted to thank the 24 of you who entrusted me with your stories for generously gifting them to your community. And, I wanted to say thanks to the rest or you, to the thousands who read the column every week, for taking the time to learn about your neighbors so that you might see them anew.

I wanted to write you a letter about the importance of that word, “neighbor,” which seems especially important now in this time rife with so much difference it’s hard to remember who we are without referencing what we’re opposed to; now, when it’s difficult to remember where all this difference began (did we inherit it or create it?) and what we ought to do with it (will it divide us or unite us?). At times like these, ideas of citizenship are imperative but seemingly impossible: can we claim our rights while also assuming our responsibilities, can we be a good neighbor while being kind to ourselves?

This column is and always has been an experiment in generosity to see what’s possible when we give one among us an opportunity to exist on their own terms and in the context of this place we all inhabit and share. I wanted to see if it was possible to love a stranger as much as we love a friend, if it was possible to overcome the inevitable complication of small-town relationships to see one another anew, and if it was possible to trust each other for just long enough to listen.

Week after week you have shown me it is.

But as I sit down to write this letter, my words, as they often do, are taking an unexpected turn. You see, I’m writing to you from the air, from 25,000 feet above the earth, from somewhere in-between Los Angeles and Denver. Having spent 10 days in California’s rumored City of Angels I’ve spent the last week thinking about what it means to belong in a place, feeling totally out of place in the one I was visiting.

At first, like many first-time visitors to L.A., I saw nothing but the way the city sparkled, but it took less than a day spent on crowded highways where cars never stop honking and streets where people look past one another and toward something else for me to start looking, desperately, for something, anything, real. I found office parks and shopping malls and highways and then, poking up between them, a lone piece of earth and sky, as familiar as the mountain horizons I knew and loved. I walked toward it, possessed by its elusive allure.

When I arrived at the sky and Earth, I found it was a cemetery with so much death packed into its crowded rows of sinking tombstones. Still, I looked on its endless green hills and remembered what it felt like to be home.

At first, I treaded somberly, wanting to walk with respect on the forever homes of our dearly departed, but step after step I lost touch with the mood I’d tried so hard to transpose on the landscape until, finally, I saw the graveyard simply for what it was.

I saw the sunlight washing the lush shrubbery in shades of green. I saw the bright, plastic flowers that the living stubbornly left for their dead. I saw families in lawn chairs circling around graves, drinking beers and pulling sandwiches out of coolers. I saw workers walking around with spray bottles and washcloths cleaning the dust off of marble markers, their act so much larger than just one tombstone at a time, but a service to each and every one of us who walks this earth and forgets to clarify, from time to time, the reflections we cast in between dust to dust.

Unaccustomed to the Southern California heat I stopped to cool in the shade of a cypress tree and, catching my reflection in a piece of etched stone, I bent down to take a closer look.

With the details of my face lost among the rock’s black and flaking surface, I stared into the vague eyes of a woman both familiar and strange and for the first time in a long time I didn’t worry about her past or wonder about her future but marveled at the evasive quality of precisely who she was. I saw life and death overlapping on my face, part of me wishing every mirror were so poignant, and part of me glad they all weren’t so demanding.

It’s this look on my face I think about now because I see it again in the reflection of the plane’s plastic window. It’s dark out, and even though I can’t see what’s below, I imagine I’m somewhere above you all, looking down on the Front Range, cloaked with night, wishing I was home, fast asleep as one among you, my neighbors, the people who make this place feel like home. Which is to say I’m grateful for where I live, where we live, where one needn’t rely on glittering marquees or graveyard tombstones to remember the preciousness of life. Because here, in our Colorado houses, the simplicity of life is what sparkles.

Mountain Folk Tales is nothing but an ode to life’s simple details, one that has been the greatest honor of my life. And, as it continues on, I am amazed to see it garner a force all its own. Once, it was a simple exploration of people, communities, place and purpose, but now it’s more: an exploration of life itself. Of course, it is only an imperfect reflection, just like the marble hiding the exactness of our features. But because of you and your generosity, as profiles and readers, the column is generous too, and what else is a neighbor?

So here is a letter to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, because together we are creating a mirror that allows us to marvel at life, ordinary life, as if it were something to look at.

Sincerely,

Sarah Haas
Peak to Peak