Getting Ready for a Long Winter's Nap...

It is a great comfort that no matter what is going on in our lives, the season move forward. In a time when the clouds, on occasion, dip down lower then the mesa, without us remembering to instruct it, the sun tilts sides way, the wind blows and the grass starts to turn brown. ...

and the evenings turn golden, just barely enough light for the deer to come into the lawn and pick the last of the apples on the almost leafless trees. 

More because the elements remind us, we humans do slip into our autumn activities. First Homecoming, where school is let out early and the students, parents and locals line Central ave for the parade, the cheerleaders riding restored fire trucks from up the mountain. 

Here the Homecoming royalty... 

aren't escorted in the backs of convertibles but pickup trucks and the homecoming dresses might have cowboy boots under them.

The other Fall activities- discussions of the weather, how cold and how much snow the mountains will have this winter and elk hunting. But it stayed too warm for the elk to come down low enough for a successful hunt this year. Warm enough to keep the windows cracked on the drive back down the mountain in Grandpa's old truck that carries the camper shell...

 Another activity that took much time this Fall...

Not riding horse, like you might think, but Daughter #2's involvement with the local high school's production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, set in the Wild Wild West. Someone leaving the borrowed boots on our porch yesterday, were so pretty in the tilting sun. 

The wind is still blowing down here on the canyon ridge, and the grass is still showing, though most of the leaves are now off the trees. 

Not so, farther up, where coming home from a weekend away on the other side of the mountains, we had to navigate this...

 and we meet these guys...

 who, looking for the grass, worked their way through a wire fence deciding the brown grass on the side or the road looked yummier. To hear them "churp" go HERE, 

As Far as I could reach...

I haven't been active on this blog lately due to some big life changing events, like the ones I talked about HERE, a few weeks ago. The last big event I mentioned in that post has to do with the above picture, well actually book cover and I've been debating how to and in what order to tell everyone about it and the other part of the story. Way to much for one blog post, so first things first and that started over ten years ago, actually I think it could have been more like twelve, when, on Saturday, over in Utah, we hiked in between places like this...

 and along the river beds like  this...

 and along the rim of this...

and there would come a point where bribery would be necessary to get these two...

back to the truck!

 
The bribe would go something like, "Wow! When we get back to the town, what do you want...?" And the "want" usually was something sweet, ice cream or a fancy drink and a book at the old Arches Bookstore in Moab, where we would also indulge in dinner or a late lunch before heading back over the border to Colorado.
Arches is no longer there, consolidating with the bookstore across the street a few years back, but a decade ago, it had the best children's section tucked in the far corner of the tiny store and we would trade, Jon and I, one would get to browse and one would take up post near the girls while they debated with much excitement which book to buy.
It didn't take long, when it was my turn to let Jon browse, to discover that the section next to the children's was that of local history and the local history in Utah, is pretty focused on the land, Edward Abbey, the Uranium boom that supplied some of the atomic bomb and most of the Cold War and  Mormons and polygamy. Who knows what I would be writing about if we lived in Ohio?

But in Utah I picked this book...,

denoted  as used by a red dot on the spin, costing me $6 and the rest is history.

Since little girls are tired after all day hikes and the two hour car drive back home is quiet, I would read my book, look out the window at this....

and wonder about the zealous religious people that had the tenacity to hack out a life in this unforgiving land no one else dared even try in places like this,..

and like this...

And so over the years,  as the girls grew, a story grew in my head and then I started to write it down and  to seek out more history and more places to make it real as possible, a willing husband, who was glad to go  along for the drive with the promise of more hiking, backpacking or mountain biking...

This place, the Four Corners, what was cut by the Colorado River and all its tributaries, is known as the backwash of the country, to wild to be tamed and very much looked over in the rush to the more fertile land on the western edge of the country, has moved me since I laid eyes on it, first around Moab, thanks to friends who had been jeeping there for years and then on our own, hiking and backpacking...

Canyonlands, Arches, and far off places like Zion and  Escalante, many of which I have written about and sketched over the years...

But something else was happen about the same time, people were talking about Uranium and the Atomic age. There was a cost to mining the uranium that supplied the atomic bombs of the Cold War. It polluted the land and the people who live here and the government, about ten years ago decided to start cleaning it up. It was in the news and on our drives back to Colorado, we went past the reclamation, clean up sites.
And I started to talk to my dad, way up in Idaho, who as a boy, during World War 2, had to have a security pass to go to the grocery store because my grandfather worked on the antennas for the the atomic bombs in Oak Ridge Tennessee, a town that did not exist before the war and was created for the soul purpose of the Manhattan Project and reading up on my families history and part in such a monumental event in our country's history, I found Utah again, where a covert operation sent soldiers with geological and mining experiences back to find and mine the uranium for the bombs.
And these interesting bits of history melded in my brain, on the long drives home or while doing art and Moonflower came to be...

"Motherless and her father too busy with his three other wives,

 their children and leading a Fundamentalist religious group, 

young Luna has the freedom to wander around Cathedral Valley, 

Utah in the summer of 1942.With no one paying attention,

 she forges a friendship with Josh McCormick, a geologist secretly sent by

 the Army to find uranium for the atomic bomb. When he returns after the war

 to mine the uranium, Luna is seventeen and their renewed relationship could

 mean freedom from a life she does not want as a second wife

 or it could mean her and her families destruction."

 Getting it down on paper, is a whole other post as is why I picked the wild Utah flower, most consider a weed for the title of not only my story but as you all know the word that connects me to my art as well....oh! And I have a whole new website...still at moonflowerstudio.biz but now also at juliakelly.biz