The Road to Leadville

The Road to Leadville.

chapter 2
My parents and brothers and sisters had lived in Climax for a long time.

My oldest brother Gordon had joined the Air Force and was in Texas. My sister Karol was very depressed about the move. Karol was in eighth grade and hated the school in Leadville.

The older Climax kids felt the same and did not want to leave their town. Life for them in Climax had been great. They were free to play outdoors and spent many hours playing hide and seek, biking, ice skating and many other group games. Hiking was a great pastime but they often got into trouble for exertions to the tailings pound, where The Climax Molybdenum Company dumped stuff it did not want.

Mother and Daddy said it was dangerous, but I know that both Karol and Gordon had played on it.

The Climax kids were the “Devils” in sports rivalry and did not wish to be a Leadville “Panther”. All of these young teens were sad that the town they called home was now only history. I on the other hand was just a kid and had not gone to school yet so it did not bother me. Coleen and Paul didn’t seem upset either.

I did not know it at the time but Leadville was the town I had been born in. In short it was a homecoming for me. My life was to take on many new challenges as I grew up in this small mountain town in the middle of Colorado.

The day we moved back into our house I met my best friend Susan and her family. They lived across the street from ours. The house they had was neat because it had two complete houses in one. I think my dad called it a duplex. There were three duplexes across the street from us.

Our house sat on a corner of a street that was round on the end and had two houses that faced the round side.
The corner of our backyard was a light pole. This was the place that the whole neighborhood of kids would meet to play hide and seek or kick the can, until our parents called us in. The light pole was home base, and if you touched it you were safe. It was hard for Susan and me to get there before we were tagged out. We were “it” an awful lot.

Susan and I became shadows of each other. If I was not at her house she was at mine. Only night separated us. We spent numerous hours playing “pretty women”. We imagined that a jacket tied on our heads was long glorious hair. (Mother always kept my hair short, so I always dreamed of long flowing hair.)

We always had the perfect amount of babies too: Ten!
Our pretend husbands were very rich and famous;though they were never around much in our dream world.

We spent endless hours in our fantasy. Lined rocks and pinecones made the walls of our imaginary homes. We would never step over these parameters, only enter and exit through the make-believe door.

When we grew tired of this game we climbed the skinny trees clear to the top until the breeze made us sway back and forth. We threw rocks, played with trucks and beat the neighborhood boys in games of marbles.

We were free, we were wild, and we were tomboys!

The weekdays seemed to have no end as we learned every square inch of our world: but I knew waiting for me at the end of the week was Saturday night.