We spent the early morning cleaning Mark’s cousin’s house a bit, washing the sheets and towels that we’d used and so on, and I made capresi for our Fourth-of-July picnic in Nederland this evening. Stan and Kathy came home about 9 am, having taken the red-eye from Hawaii and driving in from Denver. We chatted with Stan for quite a bit while Kathy got a shower and a much-deserved first nap. Of course, everyone’s meal schedules were a bit off, so Mark and I just had some of the stuff I had fixed for the picnic (and for all four of us) for lunch, and then we went for a nice long walk (about 4 miles) from the house that connects to Coal Creek Trail, which has a nice view of the flatirons and the front range, and then loops back through downtown Louisville to the house. Once we got back, Kathy and Mark started chatting about tech, and Stan and I about writing, literature, and movies–a nice division by interest/expertise!
We left a little before 5 with all of our stuff in tow–it was so nice to even get to SEE and talk to the two of them after staying at their house with their cats for five days! We made our way back up the mountain past Nederland and to what I will always think of as “Ginny’s house,” even as it will soon officially become the house of my niece and nephew, Nicki and Erik, who had been renting it from their grandmother since she went into senior living and then assisted living for their families. So when we got there for the our Fourth of July “indoor picnic” / family dinner, the house was a wonderful bee’s hive of people–Nicki and her partner Adam with their tired-out baby, Gavin, and Anjie, Erik’s wife, with her four-year-old, Jessie, as well as Jacquie and her boyfriend Mark, and Dan, my nephew who is Kati’s age, with his girlfriend Isabel, and two friends whose names I didn’t catch. Later on, Erik and Adam’s brother John, who work as arborists together, also came after a full day’s work. Did I mention there were two dogs (Rusty and Maya) and a cat (Max)? It was just the kind of whirlwind Fourth of July should be, and we had good food, including my German potato salad and capresi, delicious sliders and kabobs, a big salad, and a blueberry-rhubarb cobbler that I thought was totally delicious. Everybody talked, scooped up Gavin, played with Jessie (who is an amazingly smart kid for four years old, and has incredible verbal skills), and helped clean or fix something (Mark glued a broken bowl, because who doesn’t have epoxy handy on a road trip? We had actually bought it to fix my glasses, and left it behind with the gang for future broken dishes.).
The best thing about this fourth of July was that we didn’t do or go see fireworks–I do sometimes like to see them, but was dreading the drive to an overcrowded place like Black Hawk (Jacquie, Dan, and Isabel went). And the launching of fireworks is not my thing at all–so the fact that it’s just too dangerous here and either prohibited or not done is just great. Instead, we just kept talking and did some kitchen cleanup for a while. By about 9:30, I could about hardly keep my eyes open, and we went to bed before 10, in one my favorite guest rooms in the world, with windows facing East and North, where we’ve slept many times before and where the morning sun is so bright that no one could possibly ever sleep in!