Nothing is Random

I love it when I am caught off guard.  

Fumbling in the self-checkout line at King Soopers (the bad boy of grocery chains out West)...I hear this offer of assistance from what I thought was a "Sooper" employee.

"M'am.... can I help you?!"

(Does anyone else's hair bristle when called "M'am" these days?)

I was so preoccupied with being at the check-out helm I didn't even look up....trying to navigate the one bottle of Gatorade in my hand successfully through the self-service scanner.

To my delight, the laughter I heard was from no check-out clerk.

Ashley and I just happened to stumble into each other in Boulder's King Soopers

It was Ashley.

Ashley and I met in Maine a year ago at a 200-hour intensive yoga teacher training class. She lived literally a cove away..... me on Staples (Hannaford) Cove in Cape Elizabeth and she on Dyer.

Our friendship weaved between yoga training and neighborhood walk-bys and the knowledge we were both heading West.... Ashley in August and me to follow in September.  There was no time for even a goodbye.

And there she suddenly was - offering me a hand at the check-out counter in Boulder!

Seeing Ashley totally made that Tuesday for me.... and comforted me in the unfamiliar territory of Colorado I now walk in.  Her interjection - her laughter - her offer for Hanna and I to stay in the room that is waiting for us in her Boulder home - embodies all that we truly learned from our yoga practice with Jacqui and continue to find in ourselves.

As for randomness factors, how is it that the one Sunday I bother to flip through job-wanted ads - in The Denver Post - I happen to stumble upon a posting for a Maine store, the one I have loved working for over several summers in Maine, opening up its first satellite store out West?

Photo taken at roadside in Buena Vista area

Yep, LL Bean goes Mountain Time..... Denver.

For those asking, (and I can hear my sister now) my application is in.

No matter the outcomes, desired or not, I do believe things happen just as they are designed to.

I brought my summer LL Bean Guide vest - just in case I needed it.

Sundance Kid

Butch Cassidy:  Alright. I'll jump first.

Sundance Kid:  No.

Butch Cassidy: Then you jump first.

Sundance Kid:  No, I said.

Butch Cassidy: What's the matter with you?

Sundance Kid: I can't swim.

Butch Cassidy: Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill you.

Sundance Kid: Oh, shit...

Tell me you all have seen this movie.....an American Western classic.  

I think my love of the West began with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  My little heart pounded at Paul Newman and Robert Redford in their cowboy hats and outlaw roles... deep down thinking these bandits were simply good guys unsuccessfully trying to go "straight."

I could not have been more than nine or ten years old at the time when I first watched the movie with my parents and older sister and brother - maybe it was during our annual July trek to Maine at the Saco Drive-In  (I definitely remember watching the 1975 western Bite the Bullet at that drive-in).  

To this day, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, hands-down, remains one of my favorite films.... rugged landscape, the lawlessness of it all, handsome cowboys, a school teacher who tosses away her tiresome life.... Etta best sums it up..."I'm 26, and I'm single, and a school teacher, and that's the bottom of the pit."  

Hanna wedged in the back

Somehow I must be romanticizing myself into this movie....  wanting to say "no", for all practical purposes, to the uncomfortable "jump" of radically changing up my life.  I jumped anyways.  

I packed up my life, rolled it into the interior of a 4-runner, and drove it West for a year.  While liberating on so many levels, it was definitely not easy.  My packing ability alone, given tight spaces, simply bites ...the bullet.  Perhaps that is why Hanna successfully broke through the dog barrier TWICE! while we were traveling on I-80 West.... once in New York and the other alongside corn rows in Iowa....breaking free of the cube of space I allocated to her - finding her way to the top of the heap in the back seat right behind me.  I pulled over and repacked.  

What I did carry easily into this westward journey of mine was my want for change.  My tightly-tuned intuition ran as smoothly West as my brand new 4 Runner did itself, down I-90/I-80 past The Berkshires, alongside Lake Eerie, over the Mississippi River (which I learned from the Holiday Inn attendant divides Iowa and Illinois.... did you know they have an annual tug-o-war between those States over that River??) Read this:  (http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/travel/ct-trav-0720-mississippi-tug-of-war-20140717-story.html)  

In Chicago with my high school friend Jen Kenoian

That intuition of mine drove me the whole way (when my head did not), from the moment I asked my superintendent for a year leave of absence in June from teaching to getting on the road in September... knowing when to go, when to stop, when to sleep and when to put the miles on to make a destination  - pausing, appreciatively, to see life and a few I love along the way. 

"On the first part of the journey, I was looking at all the life..." - with my Dad (and Hanna)

My wagon made it "West" on Tuesday evening this past week.... to the generosity of Wendy and Jerry in Colorado (who also happen to be neighbors of mine in Cape Elizabeth, Maine).  

I have oriented sweet Hanna to change as kindly as I can - preparing her, so I think, for round two of the change I know lies ahead....plunging deeper into the journey - finding my own place, in time, in the Mountains of Colorado or Wyoming. 

Hopefully, we will survive "the fall".  

Dillon, Colorado

Hanna's and my adventure....love this dog.