Moving to Denver eight and a half years ago has been one of the best decisions of my life. As a child, we lived in Florida and Arizona. I had never lived anywhere with four true seasons, although I travelled all over the country for nearly five years as part of my job with MRI Network. That’s how I fell in love with Colorado. I’d fly into Denver, grab a rental car and drive through the state from Colorado Springs all the way to Grand Junction, with stops in Summit county and Glenwood Springs along the way.
I remember driving in front of a major blizzard once while leaving from Colorado Springs to head back to Denver before going north to Cheyenne, WY. That was one scary ride. I beat the storm over the pass, got through Denver just fine, and then hightailed it north. Unfortunately, the storm caught up with me about 30 minutes shy of Cheyenne. I drove that last bit hugging tight to a large semi right in front of me. He was plowing his way through and the road would have been impassible without chains if he hadn’t been there. He was even thoughtful enough to pull off the highway at my exit. I love it when everything works out.
I have truly enjoyed being able to enjoy the changing seasons in a new place. Not that "if it's July, it must be monsoon season" wasn't enjoyable in Tucson, and it's glorious mascot, the Palo Verde Beetle
wasn't perfectly creepy, but having a true fall with leaves turning on trees taller than 20 feet is something spectacular. The drives into the mountains in September and October to view the gorgeousness that is the Aspen leaves changing and the really great Zombie walk in downtown Denver herald The Fall.
We've moved closer to downtown than ever before and actually had plans for dinner with a birthday celebrating friend far from downtown the night of the Denver Zombie Crawl and we decided to use the really great public transportation system to get down south. Walking to the light rail station took less than ten minutes. Then a Lyft driver collection in a lovely luxury Mercedes to drive us ten minutes to the cavernous bar with full volleyball courts. Voila! No driving needed.
Light rail was hilarious, our stop was just before downtown and we had an almost empty train to step into. But two stops later, it felt like nearly all of the Zombie Crawl was trying to get on our train! People of all ages were participating, and this was the mostly family aged crowd getting their younguns home and to bed. Nurses, doctors, lawyers, business people, farmers and more, in their shredded clothing and shredded skin. Terrific special effects on some of them with really nutty attachments and adornments. Somebody made a killing on make up in Denver this month.
The only downside to Fall is the ending of my favorite Farmers Markets. I was really enjoying the fall vegetable bonanza, but as we are due for potential snow tonight, everything's harvested at this point. My girlfriend runs Denver Public Schools sustainability programs and has set up a number of school gardens whose students had moved on and were no longer tending them or harvesting, so she called twice with offers of free organic produce. One batch was a ton of asian eggplants, peppers and beets. So I got to experience some new recipes. Roasted with balsamic reduction was one of my favorites and easy to do as well.
The squash crop was really great this year, and I have loved learning new recipes to enjoy them. Right now two of my favorites are with butternut squash, a Ras el Hanout seasoned casserole with pecans and a squash and pear curried soup. The richness and well seasoned dishes make them taste totally different to me.
Unfortunately, I’m in a vegetable impaired household. Corn and peas are my husband’s favorites, and he does love Brussel sprouts as well. Add in onion and spinach and that’s about as diverse as he likes. I love making spaghetti sauce and sneaking in the grated zucchini.
With only one child in the house now it’s not quite as festive as it has been in previous years with my own four. Four pumpkins to carve, pumpkin seeds to toast in the oven and a maniacal Halloween decorated home for our annual party. When the kids were little and we lived in town, we would host the party with Aunt Gina playing the wicked witch telling a ghostly tale, with bags of miscellaneous food to substitute for the eyes, brains and other assorted organs in her scary story. Then a full night of trick or treating with all the neighbor kids and moms or dads. Then later, we lived so far out that we would simply throw a party to get people together!
The nearest suburban area was about a ten minute drive in from our remote rural land. So they’d go trick or treat with friends either there, or in Tucson’s most decorated neighborhood, Winterhaven. The Covenants for Winterhaven insist that you need to decorate for the Christmas Holidays and it eventually bled into Halloween as well. A great walking tour of some really nicely decorated homes and you could count on a terrific candy haul from the evening!
Denver’s fall traditions include the Zombie Crawl, one of the largest in the nation. Then there’s the Bug Ball, and about a million other parties for Halloween. We haven’t had a single trick or treater in any of our apartment buildings in five years, other than Nicholas’s twin siblings. So Nicho goes elsewhere to trick or treat. He joined his friend Michael this year. In past years he’s gone for scary, but this year, at age 13, he decided he wanted to go as a girl. So the blond wig, tights and a skirt showed up and we have one picture to prove he does look remarkably like his sister Lindley with that blond wig on! Unfortunately for him, no one knew it was a costume. Bet he’ll be back to scary for next year.
Thanksgiving is the other lovely fall holiday and what a wonderful one it is. Practicing gratitude is a terrific excuse for a holiday. Additionally, in my world, it was the only holiday I could own living in a town with both my mother and my former mother in law. Mom got Easter, my mother in law took Christmas and I latched onto Thanksgiving after the divorce. It became My Holiday. I once fed 23 people on Thanksgiving and they were all relatives. We put our deposit down on our gourmet, organic turkey today and I’m very excited to try some new recipes to go with our tried and true ones. That Ras el Hanout seasoned butternut squash may end up on the menu this year.
Our fall traditions also include an annual watching of Mel Brooke’s classic, “Young Frankenstein”. For fifteen years now, I’ve hosted a viewing of it at our home. It was one of my favorites from the moment I first watched it, and VCR’s made it possible to own it! I was thrilled and it may have been one of my first video purchases. I brought it into my job at Dun & Bradstreet and we hosted a lunch hour viewing session two days in a row that first year that had about 30 people in the room. Once I left D&B, I hosted it at home with friends and family every year near Halloween.
For two years in a row, we traveled to Europe over the Thanksgiving holiday. Oddly, they don’t celebrate it over there. But we were fortunate enough to be in London for the Sunday paper with the entire dish list and recipes for a traditional English Christmas turkey dinner. It was serendipity that someone left a paper in the airport with the exact article I was hoping to see, but the newspaper bin was sold out in our hotel and I missed it there!
Corinne and I got home, changed clothes and drove directly to the store for the makings and spent our first jet lagged hours at home making a full on turkey spectacular. Roasted Chestnuts in the stuffing, giblet gravy, homemade cranberry sauce and more. Because who doesn’t like turkey dinner after traveling?
The smell of leaves getting crunched underfoot, the beautiful colors, combined with Denver’s notoriously blue skies make me very happy. We still get enough warm days to continue riding our bikes some days as well. It’s a great time of year for me, and the icing on the cake is that the ski resorts open soon for the winter season. We didn’t ski last year and the year before but Richard’s a very elegant skier and I get by. Our hope is to spend at least four ski days up there this year. And Breckenridge is our version of Winterhaven, a beautiful neighborhood ski town that looks like a European village decked out for the holidays.
I don’t think it’s an accident that I’m a November baby as well. So for me, Fall is filled with fun, great food, good friends, happy holidays and the promise of a sparkling snow season.
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