Crones at a Campfire

We talk of how we are letting our hair be gray, letting ourselves be as we are.
Sitting with the old, graceful Ponderosa,
we feel at home because
we are not young trees anymore, but tall, elder ones with thick bark,
ones who have grown strong and flexible
from years of swaying in the unpredictable breezes
made by children and husbands and jobs and chores.

Older now, we are more solid and have shown
that we can hold our ground through gale winds,
that we can rest in the absolute calm of autumn sunset,
that we can stand silent and scared while lightning strikes around us,
that we can hope for the best.

We share news in gusts, easily, equally,
as we gaze into a fire that leaps
like hot butter from the round rock basin,
its flames making slow-motion surges
toward a sky that has only stars. 

Natural and slow,
like the trickle of Brewster Creek,
we tell about the new growth on our crowns,
about our broken branches,
about how our own saplings are thriving or struggling
as they try to send roots
into this hard and rocky soil,
about how we may not always live here.

Natural and quiet,
we pause to hear the elk bugle,
we notice the Milky Way,
we add wood to the ever changing fire.

Natural and often
we laugh, so much laughing,
ever present as duff,
gentling everything
as we surrender to how funny it all really is. 

Once expert skiers, mountain climbers, and park rangers,
now we are crones at a campfire
who have watched each other be shaped by time,
like canyons from rivers,
by motherhood and the making of a life
out of so much love and labor
in a land where wealth is the easier way. 

But money can’t buy the love we share tonight,
a love that decades and dedication have forged
and made forever places in our hearts
for each other, 
for this forest, 
for those mountains,
for that lake. 

Like each of us, they, too, have names
Uncompahgre, San Juans, Miramonte
but to us they are as familiar as family,
intimate as our laugh lines and graying hair.