Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.   This week’s column is a bit unusual in that it’s about someone who’s leaving their long-time home in Coal Creek. When I pull up to her house, the end of her chapter is marked by a real estate sign with the name Lorraine Revelle, both the listing agent and the woman I’ve come to see. She’s a wife, mother to four, founder of Canyon Cares and apparently, a real-estate extraordinaire.

I walk to the front door and stand on a brand new welcome mat. Before I knock the door opens by the hand of her daughter, the young Reyna Revelle.

“Shoes off?” I ask.

“Yes please,” she says. As I kick them aside I see a basket full of blue booties for prospective buyers to cover their feet.

I look up. The house is immaculate, the carpets so clean and well vacuumed walking across them feels just as good as walking barefoot through Spring grass. The table is preemptively set and there’s a tea party covered and at the ready.

“Coffee?” Lorraine asks.

“Yes. Black,” I say. They both cringe.

“I can’t imagine…” Reyna says. She, like Lorraine, take their coffee with cream and sugar. “I’ll give it to you in my favorite cup,” Lorraine continues, handing me a blue mug with the Wonder Woman logo.

Back when Lorraine was a single mom who did it all on her own, her daughters used to call her that, amazed as they were at her ability to raise them while working three jobs. She did it all: ad executive, office cleaner, newspaper designer.

Forty or so years later, she’s back at it, raising two more girls, but this time with a husband to help. A husband and two blonde cairn terriers, Toto with the red collar “like Dorothy’s shoes,” and Oz with the green, “like the Emerald City.” I pet them for a second before Lorraine shows them outside so she can give me a tour of the house.

Perhaps offering the tour is a habit of her trade, but still I feel a tinge of guilt in obliging her offer. Isn’t she sick of it by now? But as we travel from floor to floor, each with its own flower covered patio and distinct mountain view, I realize this is the most intimate of introductions to Lorraine.

Perhaps a person is best described by the details of their home, it is, after all, their most intimate space, and even though this house is staged for sale and all family photos stripped from the walls, I’m amazed at the perspective it provides into the woman. It’s clear the real-estate process is an art for Lorraine, an opportunity for her to manifest her inward, and one might say, defining, virtue of hospitality.

At the bottom of the basement stairs sits her husband, Fred, working I presume, as usual at his desk. He is happy to be interrupted. On a nearby coffee table is a game of Scrabble with crosswords of “home,” “sweet,” and “home,” a stroke of real estate genius. One that’s almost as good as the telescope on the top floor which, once I ascend to see it compelled me to say, “I imagine that patio’s great for stargazing,” lost for a moment in the idea of it.

“I wouldn’t know,” Lorraine says. “We borrowed it from a friend for staging.” Ahhh - there is a poetry to real-estate after all.

On the middle floor is a grand visiting room full of chairs perfectly positioned so every potential occupant would be equally a part of conversation. To the side are the two girls’ rooms, so immaculately curated and kept. This can’t be how they normally live… or is it?

The longer I talk with Lorraine the more I realize the immaculateness of the house isn’t hiding anything, but just the opposite. It’s an honest display of her attention to detail. Something about her aesthetic puts me at ease and I feel compelled to open up to this woman that I’ve just met. “Why is that?” I ask her.

“I don’t know but you’re not the only one,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “People tell me things, strangers and friends alike.”

Lorraine is a rare combination of traits — upfront and well-kept, honest and nice — and in that juxtaposition sincerity is compelled, like a tithe.

Openly, she shares details that others would likely skirt around, like the unconventional courting between her and her husband for instance.

It’s a detail of life others might hide in the name of politeness or reputation, but not Lorraine. She, like her house, doesn’t try to hide anything with its cleanliness, both are honest displays of what makes them unique and that is its own brand of hospitality.

Perhaps it’s this, Lorraine’s insistence on being real with people, that makes her such a powerful local philanthropist and what makes Canyon Cares such an effective organization.

Since she founded it in 2006, the nonprofit has doled out $170,000 in financial support to individuals experiencing crisis in Coal Creek, Nederland and unincorporated Gilpin County.

True to her nature, the Canyon Cares application process requires a level of self-aware vulnerability from prospective recipients who must both fill out a form and meet, face-to-face, with a board member to better ascertain the individual’s need of funds to help with things like a mortgage payment or a car repair.

“We need to get to know applicants because as much as they need financial support, I think they need emotional support, empathy, to have someone restore their faith that they’re not alone and that someone actually cares,” Lorraine says.

“I know how embarrassing it can be to ask for help,” she continues. “When I was a single mother I was on food stamps for about two weeks and every time I used them I felt a sense of shame. So, I stopped and instead I asked my friends and family for help. And over the years I’ve learned that asking for and receiving help is important, mostly because I’ve come to see it as substance for spending valuable time with your family, your friends and your neighbors.”

As Lorraine packs her home and her bags for Texas, Canyon Cares will continue to reinforce the ethic of being neighborly. In her absence, it will continue to be an extension of the hand from one household to the next, a way to say, “we’ve all been there.”

(Originally published in the August 23, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)