life place

Shayleen O’Hayre

Writ 101 spring 2012

Mackenzie Cole

Life Place Essay

5 February 2012   

From big to small quickly

 My home is a place, Boulder, Colorado,  filled with many people going all the time, in their fancy shirts or shoes or just a simple T-shirt and shorts, they never stop to look at all the things that are around them the Rocky Mountains or the campus of students, they all seem to be laughing and smiling at everything and anything.

 There is nothing like the view of being on the campus overlooking downtown. Standing on the CU campus and being able to see all the people below you, just going on with their lives as if you aren’t even real. I come from is Boulder, Colorado a town filled with its only cute little mall call Pearl Street, you never know what types of people you will see, I even still have moments of confusion looking at all the new people. This place that has been here for years and slowly just keeps growing store by store. Each time you step on the red and brown bricks down the path you learn a new part of history from there.  

Than you get the blue rivers that flow next to the green and yellow soccer fields behind my house, this was the spot that I would spend most of my life at. The Northfield Commons was my home away from home.  It was always possible to see all the little girls dressed in pink little dresses and sandals that never seem to stay on their feet, playing with their dolls at the playground while a soccer game is being finished. I always loved to look at them between playing time on the field and watch the enjoyment they got from that playground. Not even a fast ball flying in their direction would stop them from playing, everything to them seems simple and different because they are able to see and study all of the things around them. Being the one who would rather kick a ball than be the one dressed in the pink little outfit I didn’t understand excitement those little girls had. I never fully understood if all the young kids felt the same as I did standing in the grass under a blue sky.  The place I spent every day after school, or at least most of my time, had it been there for years before I fell the comfort and love of it, if so I am sure so many people before me had felt the same way I have.  The Northfield Commons was always filled with sweaty boy, or parents yelling at each other and refs.

Ever since I could remember though I was told that Montana was a beautiful place, somewhere filled with the same things that I loved and saw every day. It was a little Boulder people kept telling me. There was nothing like the view of things out there the green grass and beautiful trees covered with red and yellow leaves, which covered a lot of the area. For so long I would just be able to put a smile on and agree because that’s what I was told, never being able to fully understand what they meant when they explained this new adventurous place. A place I never was going to call my home not even for a second would I let that thought come into my mind, or so I thought years ago. I could never come to imagine Montana, a place that seemed somewhat made up to me so long ago as some where I would spend time and come to understand what everyone for so long told me.

 Until this day I wasn’t able to grasp the concept of somewhere else being a new home to me, a new place to shop, eat, and take my runs. Montana was just another place on the map, nothing of importance to me. I didn’t care of the people here or anything about how it looked,  I wasn’t even sure who founded it or when, if I was unsure about Montana in general it became a shocker when Missoula became my new home. I looked at Missoula and all I could do was judge it before I even got to know it.

               Colorado was always going to be my home, I was raised there my life was there, I knew nothing but that. I was honestly not ready to find anything else that I loved or wanted to make part of me.   I never thought for a second that I would be saying good bye to the view of my Rockies Mountains, where I had made many memories, they were my mountains, and in less than a second the view I got in my review mirror was those mountains that always seemed so big and glorious to me seem so small and not important. Within a second the mountains I was surrounded by every day and spent most of my life in would just be something I got to see every couple months or so. I wasn’t sure if I would get the same memories again, when I went back. People were shaped by those memoires, the defined you as a person.

 I would miss the beautiful colors of the tress and the snow that would top them off every winter. Even more I would miss all the people on Pearl Street still shopping even when it was about 5 degrees. Not to mention the smell of the green pines and the view of the place I had grown up, even the rivers that ran through the mountains, the Boulder Reservoir, a spot that I spent many summer days playing in, would always be imprinted in my mind. All the memories my friends and I had shared there. Would I ever be able to fully know the feeling of the cold water running over my feet and the slime rocks that my little toes were so calmly standing on? Or the way after you got out of the river you could walk to Pearl Street for lunch.

I would never be able to change what I knew, but even with that in my mind I was still able to find a new place not better than what I knew but still in close comparison. The mountains and view was nothing of what I had seen before. I never been able to understand why people got so excited to climb the M, I had seen views like it many times before. Being able to see the town all at once and watching all the little people going about their lives . The blank stare would stay on my face for a while until I could see these strange mountains in a way that I had known my entire life. I was used to these things before; I had seen them all in some sense or another while driving from place to place. Even though I had seen these things, I was coming to realize that the mountains here weren’t ever going to be like my Rockies, I wasn’t sure if I would come to love the Blue Mountains covered in white snow again. Missoula had new climbs that would slowly surprise me.

Even tho I haven’t been in Missoula that long and I don’t fully understand the things around me I have become to in some way to understand, the felids that kids play soccer at here. The simple campus fields that were next to thousands of students living there lives and passing by with now care. The one that runs next to the river that you can feel the mist on a windy day or see the little girls yelling at the park across the way, everything so unique and interesting to them.  Each new run on that field, I am able to learn a little new thing about that green grass as more of an importance than just something to pass by.

The mountains became a new place for me to stare at and come to be close with and make my own. They would never replace what I knew in my heart but instead each day a new aspect of them would create a new spot in my heart. The rocky step climb within the green trees, makes you feeling nothing but free and calming, adding a light snow on top of that makes it all perfect.

This place that people have grown up by their entire life is just now becoming something of my own. Thayer was never willing to except California as a new place he always looked at the bad. His home in Boulder was where he wanted to be, he judges a book by its cover and in the end ending up falling in love with that book. I did just as Thayer did I never let myself just enjoy until I slowly fell I love with little things like downtown or mountains.  Just because I am not a native of this place, I still feel that I have been able to have a connection to this simple little field or the mountains that surround the fields. I will never be able to fully understand what was there before this soccer field came about. A place that I can go and sit at for hours and do anything is a place where kids were raised or had picnics. Just like the field of my own at home I was raised on it to learn new things and love it. That is just what I will be able to do here as well. A new adventure has only began for me.