Here's what I'm going to miss about Nederland: leaving for a walk with one dog and coming back with six. Painted Winnebagos and tucked-away shrines, all dirt roads leading to our neighborhood. Friends drifting in and out, door always unlocked, dogs always in the yard. If I listen hard enough, there's always music playing.
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Boys hitching up the mountain, dreadlocked and reeking of earth-sweat. Woodstoves in trailers, one small grocery store with sage bundles and dog treats, yoga studio full of strong women, long-fingered and flat-chested. The river winding between us all, fierce and cold and bright.
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I'm going to miss the coffee shops with Oregon chais and bikes and blueberry turnovers, the underground thrift store, Norah running through the neighborhood, collecting treats as she goes. All of us so deep in the mountains, we can't even see them. It's just us and the sky.
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Nederland offered space for me. Honestly, by the time I'd made it up here, I'd realized I'd never really learned how to live, like I'd stockpiled years of truth and personality and substance from other people I'd known, from growing up in church, and I'd finally run through it all. There were truths, ways of being, that I needed to learn and believe and begin to walk in. I needed to start over, and I needed to do it somewhere near a well. And here was Ned. 
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So I started again, in this far-away mountain town where everything closes at six. I learned how to draw back, to take stock. How to feel alone without being alone, how to ask forgiveness, how to enter into this strange communion and and take initiative in my own life. How to live through the winter and begin again, and again. 
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I first moved to this place crying to God to take away my broken heart, my confusion, the empty places behind my collarbone, and God responded with hundreds of afternoons just like this one- the pine tree tops moving in the wind, illuminated with sift light, framed by dark thunderclouds. It was exactly what I needed.