My niece Kat and I moved to Longmont this past August. I feel as if I have hardly had a chance to catch my breath since then. But, I have been longing to resume my blog! I miss writing it every week!
Here is the view from my favorite Longmont walking path:
This is also the view from just about every east-west street in town. The mountains you see in the photo are Longs Peak and Mount Meeker. Longs is one of only 58 (or 53, depending on how you count) fourteeners in the State of Colorado. A fourteener is a mountain more than 14,000 feet tall.
Longmont is an interesting place. It was an intentionally designed community.
In 1869, Nathan Meeker (Mount Meeker in the photo above is named for him) ran an ad in the New York Tribune soliciting families to move to Colorado to establish a colony of “temperate, literate men of high standards”. In 1870, 144 families went west on the train and founded The Union Colony, which eventually changed its name to Greeley, Colorado.
The new name was in honor of Horace Greeley - the editor-in-chief of the New York Tribune. He popularized the phrase, “Go West, young man!”
In any case, The Union Colony inspired a group of wealthy Chicago businessmen to found the Chicago-Colorado Colony, which eventually became Longmont. Once again, they were interested in creating a temperate, literate community - Longmont is the site of Colorado’s first library and Colorado’s first city park. (The town is named for Longs Peak). You could buy a forty-acre farm in Longmont for $155 in 1871.
In 1872 Longmont had its first flour mill, in 1889 its first vegetable cannery. By 1910, having doubled its population just about every ten years since its founding, Longmont had 4,256 residents.
One of my favorite places in Longmont is the Tower of Compassion:
It was donated to the City of Longmont by the Kanemoto family who settled here in 1908. They donated a seven acre park first - in the 1960s - and later built the Pagoda. Its five stories represent aspects of compassion: love, empathy, understanding, gratitude, and selfless giving. It was donated with gratitude for the kindness of the Longmont community, which refused to force its citizens of Japanese descent into internment camps.
Once Kat and I were settled here, I needed to figure out a way to work with animals again. When I lived in Chicago I volunteered at the Evanston Animal Shelter - which was wonderful. Then, on the farm, I got to tend goats every day. Our little Bela is a wonderful cat, but I needed more animals!
So I found a job working in doggie day care - at one of those upscale places where people can drop their dogs off on their way to work in the morning, and pick them up on their way back home in the afternoon. It’s a blast - hanging out with the dogs all day.
Like this guy:
This is Django, who is my niece Clare’s dog. We got to dog-sit him for a weekend this fall. He’s a Shiba Inu/Blue Heeler cross who failed at being a working dog. He just wanted to be a pet. So his original humans found my niece, and Django found his forever home.
More on the doggie day care next week - it’s a crazy job with gobs of great stories. I want to catch up next with our soap business.
We made tons of Christmas bars before we left New Mexico. These were bars of soap made especially for the holidays. Here is a gift box of Christmas bars:
These bars are scented with Frosted Fir, Clove, and Woodland Elves. (Not all mixed together - each soap has one of those aromas). We also created a “Four Seasons” set of soaps:
In this collection, the Spring (green) is ginger-patchouli, the Summer (pink) is lilac, the Autumn (orange) is vanilla, and the Winter (purple) is Woodland Elves.
Moving the soap business up here was difficult. We had been relying on selling at the Albuquerque Rail Yards market every week, and we won’t be able to get into the Boulder/Longmont farmers’ markets until March of 2022. We did have one event booked, selling soap for a weekend at the Denver Convention Center - one of the largest convention centers in the world. Here are a couple of my nieces setting up our booth:
In any case, please check out our web-site. We have redesigned a lot of our bars, we’re carrying new “manly” scents, we have lots of great bars for stocking stuffers, and gift boxes for holiday present exchanges.
SerenaSoaps.com - that’s our website. We have a logo now! My nephew Michael made it for us. Anyway, please check it out.
I’m going to end with another spectacular photo from my new home:
I have nothing but gratitude for the amazing fortune that allows me to live amid such beauty.