Another Fall Day in Alternative, Colorado

Another Fall Day in Alternative, Colorado

This weekend, I went for a walk early in the morning and I could definitely feel a change in the air. There was frost in a few spots on the grass and for the first time this year, I could see my breath. The leaves are certainly feeling the changes and the colors are beautiful.

I didn’t think that I’d see anyone else out at this time on a Saturday morning, as most of the people who live here seem to enjoy sleeping in, or at least they don’t leave their houses until the sun is well in the sky, but today was different. Today, as I walked down the street toward the park, I glanced over at the house I was passing and saw Mrs. Harper in her rocking chair with a crocheted wrap around her. She was rocking back and forth and just looking out at the morning and the horizon. The sun hadn’t come up just yet and the clouds were a beautiful and bright orange which glowed against the varying shades of blue in the sky.

Mrs. Harper was in her late seventies and loved to head down to the Senior Center every Thursday evening to meet up with her friends in the Alternative book club, where they would spend a quiet half and hour reading the latest book chosen by the President of the club, Barb Walton. Barb liked romance novels and some months when she felt a little daring, she would choose a mystery novel for everyone to read. After the half an hour was up, they would all see where they were in the book and then discuss the finer points such as what the author must have been thinking when he or she wrote this or that. They would also find time to discuss how Alternative compared to the setting in the current book and who was the most like certain characters. There was one time when Barb and Greta Thompson argued for almost two days about who was the most like the heroine in The Alaska Valley Ranch telling each about long lost romances and strengths that each of them had that compared to the protagonist. Eventually, Barb won out as she always seemed to do, feeling would be hurt for a while until Barb would take the club out to a special lunch and honor one of the members. Of course this particular month Greta was the one being honored. Barb encouraged the entire club to lavish her with compliments and accolades and by the end of the evening, she was feeling much better about things. 

Barb was the kind of person that you wanted to try and keep happy. She had money, left to her by her late third husband, and she was more than happy to invest that money in things that she felt were worthy of the effort it took to write the check and several people vied for that money with promises of great inventions or the first ever to do this or that. Barb had seen them all. The one person that Barb couldn’t get to, however, was Mrs. Harper. I didn’t know her first name and I sometimes wondered if anyone did. Everyone that spoke with her, including Barb, called her Mrs. Harper. She kept to herself and was very soft spoken Some people said that she was a princess from some country in South America at one time and that her coming to Alternative was to escape her fallen kingdom which was taken over by a small dissident group of rebellious military rebels. But no one could prove it. Mrs. Harper nodded at me and called out, “How are you and the family?”

I told her that they were fine and asked about her. She simply smiled and nodded and then nodded toward the sky. “I love to watch the sun come up in the morning. Do you know why, young man?”

I shook my head because I wanted to her what this woman had to say.

“The sunrise is different every morning. The sky looks and does what it wants every day and doesn’t care what onlookers think. It is what it is and will only change according to what it wants to do. People should be more like that, don’t you think?”

I looked to see the sun just peeking over the horizon. When I turned back, Mrs. Harper was just heading back into her house, but not before turning back and giving a small queen’s wave and a slight smile. If you looked closely, you could see a glint in her eye just as she vanished into the house.

There were no others like her in Alternative, ever before and there would never be again.