Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.   There are a lot of ways to measure a life. For Longmont/Jamestown resident Sibyl Goerner you could count by number: 96 years old, 3,484 Sunday services spent as the Pastor’s wife at Longmont’s Central Presbyterian Church, two houses, three kids, five grandkids, two great-grandkids and one one-handed husband.

Or, you could take a more historical approach: Sibyl has lived through 17 presidents, travelled to 50 countries, spent 41 summers in the family’s hand-built Jamestown cabin, and lived 51 years in Longmont, during which time she watched the town grow from a population of 5,000 to 95,000.

You could even try to count her character: in talking with her for two hours she made herself laugh at least two dozen times, referenced 15 books, and listed off 25 different wildflowers living in her front yard meadow.

I assume everyone dreams of mountain meadows and the one in front of Sibyl’s house is probably what you see when you do — it’s wild and broad and goes all the way from her front door to the banks of the James River. I imagine many a moose has taken a nap there in the middle of the day and that the pioneering aspens around it would love nothing more than to claim it as their own.

“My sons cut down nine aspens yesterday,” Sibyl says, having spent the last few days with nine of her kids and grandkids getting the cabin ready for Fall.

Although the family likes to joke that Sibyl’s late husband built the house “single-handedly,” the cabin has always been a collaborative project.

“When folks heard the Goerners were building a cabin they offered everything and we took anything. We’d spent our whole savings on the property after all — $900 for three acres and $100 in closing costs. We were broke. The only thing we bought new was this linoleum floor because they said it would last a lifetime. Well, I’m here to tell you it does,” she says, laughing (this being one of those times she makes herself giggle). ​

As a result, the cabin is a sort of second-hand historical site: the back door came from the Harold Pratt House in Longmont, most of the lumber and siding from Estes Park’s long-gone Fall River Lodge, and many of the house’s little details, like the old-fashioned door-ringer that rings when twisted, comes with it’s own piece of Goerner family lore.

If you ask, Sibyl will tell you all about it, she’s exuberantly proud of her house and her family and I have a feeling she’d prefer this column were mostly about them, but I’ll remind you, like I remind her, that this is her story.

Sibyl was born in 1922 in Cheyenne, Wyoming where her father worked at the railroad, helping folks ship cattle and crops. When she was just a few years old they moved to Denver which, with 20,000 residents, was still just a small town. They settled into a neighborhood on the North side of town full of immigrants from Germany, Sweden and Italy. The streets were lined with meat shops and cute little stores of imported goods.

While attending North High, Sibyl joined the Pep Club in which she learned to twirl a baton. She says it’s been years since she last spun one, but as she talks her wrists move in little figure eights and I have a hunch she’d pick it up again easily. On game days the whole club would load into city street cars to ride to games at the university’s field.

“We’d be dressed in our purple skirts and mustard tops with the “V” for Viking, and of course, we’d wear our purple hats. I loved hats,” she says.

“We used to go try them on at Joslin’s on 16th St. (now a historically registered landmark in Denver). They had all these hats, right by the front door. Me, I’d try on anything but a cloche — they were just too tight around my pin curls.”

Soon after receiving a degree in dietary nutrition at CSU (then called the Colorado Agricultural College) Sibyl met her husband, Stan Goerner, the youth pastor at her Denver church. It didn’t take long for them to fall in love and marry, which they did in the summer of 1951, just two months after moving to Longmont where Stan, at the young age of 24, had been hired as the Pastor at Central Presbyterian.

Other than to say that Stan was a happy man who was a joy to spend a lifetime with, Sibyl doesn’t offer up many details about their relationship. I guess it’s because she doesn’t feel like she needs to, surrounded as she is by the home and family that they built together. She tells me that Stan passed in 1999 and suddenly I’m struck with how quiet it is here and I wonder if she ever gets lonely. She answers with a story:

“I read this book, the diary of Katherine Garetson, who homesteaded at Big Owl in 1914. She was proving the land and had spent an entire Winter all by herself. One day the adventurer Emos Mills came to check in and when she heard herself speak she was spooked by the sound of her own voice. Ever since I read that I’ve been going around talking to chairs and tables so that won’t happen to me.”

But Sibyl isn’t alone, not really. She’s got her family and her church and, of course, the Mountain Old Ladies Literary Society (MOLLS) that meets once a month to “talk about books and life.” MOLLS is 20 years old, Sibyl’s been a part of it for 15 years, and sitting on her desk is a little green index file of all the books that have been read and borrowed in that time. After flipping through the cards she walks me out the front door where we stand in the meadow for a few moments.

“Anything else?” I ask.

“Not really,” she says. “Except that life is about living. Enjoy it. Learn all the time. If you’re gonna watch TV, just watch public television. Love your family and friends. Have faith.”

Maybe life isn’t for measuring after all.

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 August 30, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)