Tag Archives: denver

Houses

“If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you came from on a map.  All those places where you lived are just that: places.  You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events.  And those are mapped in memory.  Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are.  Almost not born at every turn.  Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots.  Stories shading into one another.  You come from [stories…events…people].”

-Anne Marie McDonald in The Way the Crow Flies

In Des Moines

  • The basement apartment
  • The Washington Street house, earliest memories

Me at the Washington Street house…on the Anderson-Erikson Dairy  milkbox

  • 1310 York Street, 2 doors down from Grandma Baker
  • 1723 York Street, the first one my parents ever bought (across the alley and one street over from Aunt Rosie)

In Davenport

  • 3536 Jersey Ridge Road, the acreage with ponds and baseball games
  • 5506 North Howell

In  Cedar Rapids

  • the “parsonage” on some street I can’t recall

In Robert, La

  • “the parsonage” on highway 190 east of Hammond
  • with Ginger (and Miss Clara for a few weeks)

In Gary

  • 4995 Roosevelt Place

In Minot

  • Dorm Room
  • Trailer in married student housing park
  • barn-shaped house

In Kokomo

  • 1106 Armstrong Street

In Sioux City

  • Leeds neighborhood house for one week (house had major problems ;[ )
  • Jackson Street-the yellow house
  • across from school, our first house to ever buy, huge!

In Norfolk (don’t ask)

  • N 10th, loved this house
  • N 13th, historical Victorian, loved it, too
  • Park Place, just passing through
  • “orange” house, endured
  • “Bob” Nebraska, torture (not the house, the season)

In Denver

  • Acoma Street house (where we had “Graceland Home School”)

In Brighton

  • Pheasant Ridge, land of grandbebes

There was actually some zig and some zag between some of these.  But these are all just houses.  They aren’t where I am from, though I enjoy looking at them again via Google-maps.  They are just places I lived.  Home is where my heart is.  And where my heart is held with great care

Where thou art ~ that ~ is home.  Emily Dickenson

 


“It’s anywhere I’ll ever go and everywhere I’ve been

Nothing takes my breath away like my front porch looking in”

One Day in Denver

Me and my girls Saturday.  Me, Jovan, Tredessa, Stefane (back row), Tara (in front), Stormie, Stephanie, Elise-the-Niece, and Katie from the Springs

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Cherry Creek for Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Sur La Table, and Restoration Hardware.  Stormie got her vintage-inspired bowls – lots.  Alright, already with the bowls! :)  The girl is a bowl nut!

South Broadway for Decade (inspiring, old/vintage and new-I got the best alphabet flash cards I have ever seen there!), and True Love Shoes (great accessories) where the 9 of us just sort of filled every square inch of space.  Delicious spinach pizza-by-the-slice at the world-famous Famous Pizza.  Elise was heard to exclaim, based on the fact that her teeth remained leafy-green free, “We are so good at eating spinach!”  She is gleeful by nature!

We braced ourselves and went into a house in Denver where the “Thriftonista”  was liquidating her vintage clothing.  We arrived there with the Channel 4 newswoman who taped a segment for the 5 o’clock news about ways people are saving money.  That place was packed, due to a notice via e-blast to the  Denver fashion-scene types, which includes 2nd daughter, Stephanie.  Wall-to-wall people were madly digging through clothes whose year’s I could name between 1964-1989.  Some of it was questionable as far as fashion the first time around.  Nonetheless, it was a fun run around the memory block for me and Tara’s arms can be seen earnestly flipping through the rack of tightly packed, hung clothing on the news segment.  During the interview with the Thriftonista herself, I am visible with my back to the camera as I just mainly try to avoid being stampeded by all the 20-somethings intent on buying my mother’s 1970s wardrobe.  We were on TV!

On East Colfax we soaked up Fabric Lab ambience (I really was NOT cool enough to be in there) and then splurged for a couple of coffees, a couple of waters and 12 cupcakes at The Shoppe which set us back more than lunch had.  Yikes!  Well, you only go around once and we can now say we have had very, very amazingly delicious cupcakes at the trendy hole-in-the-wall cupcake store for 40-some-bucks, nevermind that I could have achieved the same for about $4.  That is not an insult to them, nor their not-entirely catchy slogan which is something like: Don’t be a hater, eat a cupcake (?) – it is just that I can make really good cake, when I want to.  I am sure if the people at Westword and The Denver Post and all those other places that have given them “Best of” awards had one of mine, well, you know…

Tallulah Jones was defnitely a favorite.  We like stores that are full of ideas as well as merch.  Mod Living wasn’t the thrill wed hoped and Urban Living’s best part was the cool dog that met us at the door.

Two cars, nine women, all of Denver’s best in one day.  Sore legs.  Thinking ahead to our next outing…maybe a movie in our jammies?  Whew!  I am so older than the rest!

LOVE these girls!  So blessed!…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF:  Oh, I know-next time I take the girls to MY favorite: Djuna!