Last Monday marked 5 years since we closed on our house here in Cañon City.
I already shared how our trajectory towards transformation lead us here. I told you how Casa Dexter relocated to Main Street as part of the TechStart group here in town. We settled in pretty nicely and we love our dear home.
It’s never easy leaving some place you’ve lived in for over twenty years (in Sara’s case), much less 40 years (for me), and leaving Austin in 2017 certainly proved that again.
We miss so many friends and the live music scene, but we don’t miss the traffic or property taxes. Since moving away, we’ve come to enjoy returning to Austin as visitors, rather than as residents.
At first, we headed back to Texas somewhat frequently, but after the pandemic chased us back on the eve of the suddenly cancelled SXSW 2020 (including the EDU conference I was already there for), we pretty much hunkered down even more than we usually do.
But, see, that wasn’t hard for us, really. We’re both homebodies at heart. Twenty years of freelancing meant I’d been practicing remote communication for literally decades. And Cañon City suffered less from the contagion’s effects than most places due to being both rural and somewhat out-of-the-way. We know how lucky we’ve been in that respect
Have we rooted here in southern Colorado then? Well, Cañon City topsoil is kinda thin, so I’m not sure I’d say we’ve “rooted” here, but we’re working at it. We do love our home. We love our neighbors and we love our neighborhood. We love our little city with its quirks and problems. We love the Arkansas River we can stroll alongside and the Royal Gorge we visit both by train and the bridge. We love our region.
heading into Cañon City from the east
We live where the great plains run into the mountains. We’re the lower edge of Colorado’s Front Range and the southern route westward through the mountains. When we first spotted Cañon City as we came around a hill descending off that plain, we saw it as a great “green bowl” at the end of our flatland drive.
Maybe we’re more like the tumbleweeds you see blowing across that high plain. The wind has carried us as far we’re going to go and we’ve come to rest here along the river at the foot of the mountains.
We landed in a good place and we’re happy to call it home.
Buller's back porch 