I'm a Coloradan !

It's official.  When someone asks me where I'm from I can now say Colorado.  I've been calculating when this day would arrive on some of my walks this spring, knowing that I was getting close.  You see, I've now just surpassed my total time living in Colorado over that spent living in New York.  I've lived in N.Y. on three separate occasions and here in Colorado on two.  I have also lived a couple of other places, but the majority of my life has been spent in these two states.

I remember clear as day driving into Colorado Springs all of those years ago with my bike strapped to the back of my car and everything else I owned in the trunk.  I would have never guessed then that I would wind up here for so long.  And it's been mostly fab and very little drab!  If this ends up not being my forever home, well, at least I can say I'm a Coloradan 


Clearly this post has nothing to do with Paleo so if that's what you came for you can stop reading now.  Also, the story that follows is just a brief recap as to how I'm actually the fourth generation of my family to live in this great state of Colorado.

In 1941 my great grandfather, Henry Walter Henderson (know as Judge Henderson - his title) came down with Tuberculosis while living in Warsaw, Missouri.  He was advised, like many people back then, to move to Colorado where the dry climate and sunshine could possibly help with the disease, which it did.  While visiting him for a planned two weeks, my great grandmother decided she loved the place and wasn't going back to Missouri.  So they rang up their daughter Laura (my grandmother), told her to sell everything, and move on out to Colorado with them.

My grandmother was in her early twenties then and found work at some point (as a secretary likely) in Camp Hale, near Tennessee pass (then headquarters of the 10th Mountain Division).   This is where she met and married her first husband, Claude (Shelby) Ford.  As a matter of fact, my mom has some pics of them walking down the 'aisle' together under a bunch of ski poles held up by 10th mountain guys.  Unfortunately, Shelby was gunned down in Italy during the last official battle for the 10th on the 30th of April, 1945, just 7 days before the Germans surrendered. 

A few years later, in 1947, my grandmother then met my grandfather in Colorado Springs, who was stationed at what was to become Ent Air Force base (which is now, oddly, the U.S. Olympic training center).  They married later that year and began the typical military lifestyle of moving around the globe every 3 years or so. 

Enter Mama Aspen Paleo.  After graduating from high school in Alaska, she moved to Colorado Springs in the late sixties where she was a nursing student at the Penrose hospital nursing school.  She didn't actually graduate from there, instead, finishing her degree in Brooklyn. 

And then there came me.  I moved to Colorado Springs after graduating from college and soon found my way to Manitou Springs.  I then went back to N.Y. briefly and finally returned, this time to Aspen, destined to become a Coloradan.  Good stuff.