A Lazy July Day in Alternative, Colorado. Week one living here.

It was just another lazy and hot day in Alternative, Colorado in the middle of July. Even the birds decided to get as far into the trees as possible in order to escape the heat. That sometimes happens in the summer in the mountains. Temperatures reaching into the lower 100s are not uncommon.

Those who had air conditioners ran them and those who didn’t ran fans and swamp coolers. Our new house came with A/C so we were among the fortunate, although we quickly became popular among the folks who had no air conditioning. Martha, our next door neighbor, was one of the unfortunate ones who had no cooling system, and so it came as no surprise when she showed up at our door with a home baked cherry pie, baked a few days earlier when the weather was cooler. Once inside, it was important for her to begin telling us a few stories and suggest that the pie be eaten right away, perhaps with a scoop of ice cream, even though it was two in the afternoon.

Most of the cars in Alternative had air conditioners, and so people weren’t at all averse to taking a drive to some nearby larger city like Greeley or even down to Denver to go to the malls and shop and possibly see a movie in the air conditioned buildings there. Had it been three years ago, they might have stopped at Jimmy’s Market on Main Street and do some grocery shopping, as it was the only business on Main Street that had air conditioning. Jimmy had run the store for twenty years. After getting it up and running and being successful during the first two years, Jimmy’s wife blessed him with a baby boy. They named him Jimmy Junior and just called him JJ.

Jimmy couldn’t remember a day during that last eighteen years that he had the store, when JJ wasn’t around. Jimmy figured that eventually, JJ would take over running the store and Jimmy could retire and take his wife, Clarise, on a cruise to Alaska or even down to that Disneyland Island around Florida. But when he turned eighteen, JJ announced that he was heading off to Montana to get a job on a ranch. Jimmy was crushed but wouldn’t forbid JJ from leaving and figured that he would eventually come back, but after two years of waiting, Jimmy decided to just close the doors on the grocery store and sell the building. Some out-of-state investor came in and bought the building and used it as a write-off, pretty much leaving it to fall into disrepair, until the city council had to contact him about it and he had it torn down.

But the heat, lack of air conditioned buildings and especially, the lack of a grocery store in Alternative, gave Lester Timberwick an idea. Lester arrived in Alternative about three years ago from California. Martha thought that she heard him mention once that he was a lawyer in California and that he just didn’t want to deal with the injustices of the world anymore, so he found his way to Alternative. At least, she was pretty sure that she heard him say that sometime when she was out. None-the-less, Lester had an idea. He bought a van and offered, two or three times per week, to shuttle people back and forth to either Greeley or Fort Collins so that people could do their shopping without having to drive themselves or put wear and tear on their cars. His van was air conditioned, and so whether they had to go or not, numerous people would pay the few dollars to have Lester take them into town and drop them off at the local air conditioned establishments. Lester was good at his job and managed to talk non-stop during the half hour drive into town. He’d talk about law, and Colorado, and the local politics, such as they were. Most people liked the current mayor, Mayor Tom as he liked to be called.

Mayor Tom was great at fishing, and encouraged people to buy their fishing licenses from city hall and go down to the well stocked pond near Alternative Park. People would take their families and sit on the shore of the lake, catching trout and throwing them back, They’d talk about where they wanted to go and the things that they’d like to do. But most importantly, they spent time together as families and loved every minute of it, waiting for the sun to go down and the cool breezes to fill their homes for the night of rest and recuperation to prepare them for the next hot summer day. They’d hug each other, and walk home, maybe stopping at Lyle’s Pizza by the Slice shop on the way, and dream about Alternative becoming a bigger town.

And that’s the news this week from Alternative, CO., where people think about different things.