There are empty shelves and full boxes. There are random pieces of furniture, some destined for the Habitat ReStore and some to be moved and a king sized water bed to be disposed of (anybody interested in a full motion mattress??). The first problem is that we still have no firm date for the move. Every overnight trip to Evergreen has involved loading a few more boxes. That means that we have boxes in Greeley and boxes in Evergreen. That leads to the second problem, this all seems very unreal. The cause of the extended delay is a bathroom reconstruction project that started in early December. The actual delay is due to a custom vanity that is not due to ship until February 11. Once it is in place, we’re told the finish of the project is a week further on. So until then, we’re primarily in Greeley and only occasionally in Evergreen. That leads to the third problem. Whether it is at my local Rotary meeting or encounters in the grocery store, I’m getting a lot of quizzical looks. “Are you still here?” I think for the sake of the poor souls who keep running into us I need to look up the words from an old rock song: How can we miss you if you won’t go away?
Coming Back
God willing, we will soon be moving back to our long-neglected home in Evergreen. This move comes with both anticipation and regret. I’ll get to the anticipation later. The regret is due to leaving the place where we’ve spent the vast majority of our time for the last 15+ years. The place is a small city in the northern part of the state, a few miles east of the dreaded I-25 corridor, a place called Greeley.
The current tag line of the city is “Greeley Unexpected.” That was certainly true for us long before their marketing people came up with the phrase. In that town we found wonderful people committed to making Greeley a great place to live, to celebrate, to work, to raise a family. There were, as there are everywhere, some cranky folks who seemed to rejoice in negativity, but we were impressed by the commitment of long-term “Greeleyites” to build and bless, ignoring the negative voices. There’s a lot I could write about the life, culture, and community spirit of the place and maybe I will later, but we are leaving the city and moving back to Evergreen.
So if Greeley is so great, why are we leaving? That’s a long story in itself. The shorter version is that our original move to Greeley from Evergreen was to be temporary, 18-24 months at most. That was September of 2003. Things didn’t go as planned. We rented a condo and soon found our stay extending and the job changing in purpose and scope. At the end of 2007 I accepted the invitation to become Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church. That position I held there until December 31, 2018 when I stepped down to retire. We might have sold or at least rented out our home in Evergreen at that time except for two problems. The first was that we were doing some DIY remodeling when the call came to go to Greeley and the house was not in rentable shape. The second problem was the fact that by the time I accepted the call to Trinity, the Evergreen home no longer qualified as our primary residence and any capital gains from the sale (and we bought the house in 1989 when there was a major oil bust devastating the Evergreen housing market) would be rather excessive. So for all of those years we would visit our Evergreen home every other Sunday afternoon and then drive back on Monday for another 2 weeks in Greeley.
But now that’s over. Evergreen has grown a lot and changed a bit since 2003. Many of the people we knew from our former life there are no longer around. We have a whole new place to explore, new people to connect with, new areas where we can serve as volunteers. We are looking forward to the coming years at 7600 feet and what God will have us doing. However, Greeley we will never forget and remember our time there with gratitude and appreciation.