Moving!
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
Volume XXVII, Issue Two | September 2026
There’s no other word for it: Moving sucks!
I’ve spent the past six months dealing with a move. We were happily ensconced in our Denver home last January when Povy found the ideal condo for us near her in Golden. She thought at our advanced age and with Bob’s failing mental health, we ought to be close-by her. I was in denial. After all Gram had lived to be 101.
The condo was appealing. Located in the heart of downtown Golden, across from the oldest bar in Colorado (the days are long gone when that might have been an inducement), it had floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the mountains and the mesas. The condo included a large terrace and a smaller covered balcony with a view of the Colorado School of Mines “M” on the mountain directly in front. With two bedrooms and a study, it was sizeable. The unit might be the best condo in Golden, and it was going to be snapped up.
Did we want to move? No! But maybe it was time. Three months later (!) we closed, and the day after that, the painters moved in. Little did I know how much work the place would need.
By then, I had put aside writing (I didn’t even write a June issue of this newsletter) and was busy sorting and packing and disposing of huge quantities of our belongings. Last time we moved, I’d hauled the contents of one basement to another. Now, we had only a storage room big enough for a bike. I gave 25 boxes of my papers and books to the library, five boxes of Bob’s family photographs and letters and papers, along with his grandfather clock, to his nephew, boxes of cookbooks and dishes to a niece, and innumerable truckloads of God-knows-what to Goodwill. A vanload of art and antiques went to a dealer in Utah. I saved only five copies of each of my books and sold the rest to West Side Books in Denver. (West Side is selling them at a huge discount if you want any of my earlier books.)
Carrying boxes from the basement was backbreaking, literally. I went to bed each afternoon with a heating pad. At first, it was heart-breaking getting rid of the accumulations of a lifetime—the girls’ valentines, doorknobs Dad had collected 60 years ago from old houses being torn down, even the scrapbook I’d kept through high school and college. But letting go of so much was somehow cleansing.
Disposing of stuff was easy compared to getting rid of furniture. That’s because nobody wants furniture these days. I was lucky to give it away. Bookshelves and a wingback chair went to a couple starting a used bookstore, a wingback to a writer friend. I couldn’t find anyone to take my wonderful antique brass bed and finally gave it to one of the movers for his daughter.
When we first looked at the condo, Povy suggested I use the guest room as an office. But the space was too small. So I settled on a windowless room that I suppose was designed for TV viewing. I added a floor-to-ceiling bookcase along one wall and filled the room with books, Indian rugs, my favorite pictures, and my desk. I added an old pie safe that came out of the Shiprock. N.M. trading post to hold supplies.
We lived in chaos for the first few weeks, but as the work declined, our decorator friend Elaine went to work. I trust her implicitly, because, as Povy says, she is always right. In fact, I left the day she hung pictures and set out the few decorative items we had retained. When I returned, the space was looking like home.
The work isn’t finished, but four months after we moved, we’re settling in. This place probably suits our needs better than our previous home. We can sit on the balcony and watch the paragliders on the mountain or go downstairs and have our choice of half-dozen restaurants within a block or two. Povy is nearby to help care for her dad. Dana retired last month, and she expects to visit more often. Life isn’t what we’d planned, but is it ever? I’ve started writing again and even finished the first draft of a book. Maybe someday I’ll write about an old lady who didn’t know what to do and moved into a condo instead of a shoe.
What’s in a Word?
Well, plenty, if it’s the New York Times’ A Word of the Day. I was thrilled when a friend found this reference. I’ll make it into the Times one way or another.:
misdoubt
PRONUNCIATION:
(mis-DAUT)
MEANING:
verb tr.: To doubt or suspect.verb intr.: To have doubts.noun: Doubt or suspicion.
ETYMOLOGY:
From mis- + doubt, from Old French doter (to doubt or fear), from Latin dubitare (to doubt or hesitate). The doubt element is ultimately from the Indo-European root dwo- (two), which also gave us dual, double, dubious, doubt, diploma, twin, between, and didymous (occurring in pairs). Earliest documented use: 1530s.
NOTES:
Usually, the prefix mis- indicates that something is wrong: to misspell a word is to spell it incorrectly. In a few older formations, however, mis- could reinforce a verb that already expressed a negative feeling, as in today’s word. Misdoubt means “to doubt” or “to suspect”, not “to doubt incorrectly”. If you expected the latter, you missed out.In Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, after the Countess’s steward confirms that Helen, a gentlewoman in the Countess’s household, loves her son, Bertram, the Countess says, “I could neither believe nor misdoubt.”
USAGE:
“’Listen to that, Mother Bullock. She’s the same age as me.’‘I’d have guessed she was older,’ Mother Bullock said, which I misdoubt was a compliment to me.” ~ Sandra Dallas; Alice’s Tulips; St. Martin’s Press; 2007.
And Words for The Colorado Book
The following was written by Patricia Calhoun in Westword and is a lovely tribute to Fulcrum funder and Publisher Bob Baron, who died shortly after The Colorado Book was published.
Above: “The Colorado Book” published in time for the state's 150th (left) and the original.
Bob Baron passed away this year, but not before he gave Colorado a big 150th birthday present: a new edition of “The Colorado Book.”
On the surface, Baron was an unlikely person to capture this state’s literary history. Born in Los Angeles, he studied physics and philosophy, went into engineering, served in the Army, and was program manager for Computer Control Company, which worked on the Mariner II (Venus) and the Mariner IV (Mars) on-board computers; he later became worldwide systems manager for Honeywell’s minicomputer business. In 1971, he founded Prime Computer, which became a Fortune 500 company in the 1980s.
Along the way, though, he wrote numerous articles, and when he moved to Denver in 1984, he founded Fulcrum, a publishing company focusing on books that reflected his deep interest in history, conservation, civics, the Southwest and Native American writing.
In 1993, Fulcrum published “The Colorado Book,” an anthology of writings about Colorado that became a fixture on bookshelves across the state. “I wanted to spend the next period of my life on helping to present meaning,” he told the Denver Post in 2007. “Books always have been the way to communicate meaning – and even more so now.”
As the state’s sesquicentennial approached, Baron knew there was still more to communicate about Colorado, so he asked author Sandra Dallas (who worked on the original anthology) and Tom Noel, the historian known as Dr. Colorado, to update “The Colorado Book.”
“I didn’t want to get involved,” Dallas admits. “Been there, done that.” But Baron “really pushed this,” and at his urging, she decided to go there again.
After all, much had changed about Colorado’s literary landscape in the preceding thirty years. “I hadn’t even written fiction when the first book came out,” Dallas points out. Since then, she’s published more than twenty novels, adding to her roster of non-fiction books about Colorado. And so many other authors have started writing…or been rediscovered.
“I sort of viewed this not as an updated version, but also almost as a companion book,” Dallas says. While Noel focused on history, Dallas concentrated on contemporary works. “We had no criteria on this book,” Dallas says. “A lot of it was writings that we knew. There were areas that were not covered in the first book, and authors that were not covered … we looked around for anybody we could find.”
And they consulted everyone they could find, before comparing notes with a third editor, librarian Pam Sandlien Smith, and coming up with the final roster. “We added stuff that we wanted, but the disappointment was that there was so much we wanted that wouldn’t work,” Dallas says. Authors like Ted Conover, who’s written many nonfiction books – but whose recent “Cheap Land Colorado” just didn’t have a section that could be excerpted. Ultimately, they whittled 210 possibilities down to 155.
The new edition includes nature writer Enos Mills, who somehow was left out of the first book. Both John Denver and Judy Collins made the cut for this volume, as did Allen Ginsberg’s “Plutonium Ode.” While some of the writers in the original were trimmed or eliminated altogether, other favorites remain, such as Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s “Old Men on the Blue,” a poem about Breckenridge, where Dallas lived in the early ’60s.
“Colorado authors hold up, and are getting national recognition; they’re not just regional authors,” she says. “They have a sense of the state, they know it. They’re not outsiders flying in and telling a story. Essentially, they’re fun to read and they’re worth reading…
“We have such a rich literary heritage in Colorado, and it’s continuing,” Dallas concludes.
Sandra‘s Picks
Borderlands
By Ken Salazar
Ben Bella Books
Ken Salazar was a Colorado senator, head of the Department of the Interior, and Ambassador to Mexico. In this beautifully written narrative, he tells of his life as a boy on a farm in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, and his path to a life devoted to public service.
As a child, he faced discrimination when other kids considered him a “dirty Mexican” and belittled the tortillas he brought for lunch instead of bread.
Salazar realized early on the importance of diversity. He worked hard to deal with the border crisis, although his plans were often thwarted by politics.
I especially liked the story he tells that when he first ran for the Senate, against beer magnate Pete Coors, the two men sat down and agreed to stick to the issues instead of attacking each other. What a contrast to politics only 25 years later.
Appearances: A Conversation with Marc Stevens
Writer Marc Stevens and I will talk about writing, our books, and anything else we feel like at 10 a.m., on Wednesday, Nov. 18, at Golden City Chambers, 911 10th Street, Golden, CO, next door to the Golden History Museum. Marc is the author of the thriller Two Truths and a Lie and No Lie Lasts Forever. The two of us held a similar conversation at the Douglas County Library when The Hired Man came out last spring and had so much fun that we wanted to repeat it. The event is free, and everyone is welcome.
And author Marj Charlier and I will have a similar "performance" at 7:15 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 24, at West Side Books, 3434 West 32nd St. in Denver.
