While I originally intended this to be a blog about happenings in my small town, I find that I enjoy telling stories so much more than writing articles. I believe in people more than I believe in places, in the stories behind the everyday life. So I’m changing directions mid-stream.

Today, Nucla doesn’t feel like such a magical place to me. I’m an adult now, I see those things I never really paid attention to before, and they really do make me sad sometimes. Is this still the place I grew up? The place I spent my summers, filled with magic and adventure.

I always looked forward to summers spent with my grandmother. My mother and I moved around a lot, from town to town, from state to state. No matter how many years we had been gone, even my mom would say we were going “home” for the weekend. Nucla has always and will always be home.

I wasn’t relocated here, I didn’t move here as an adult. I grew up here, and to me that is something special. These are my roots, my foundation. This is where I came from, and the place I always return. The place I received my first kiss, went on my first real date.

The people who surround me, half of them watched me grow up, the other half I watched grow up. I see kids running around, and I remember their parents at that age. How much fun we had, how much trouble we tried to stay out of.

I remember the time a group of friends and I decided to ride our bikes to Naturita, which is only five miles away. We decided five miles wasn’t going to be any fun, so we took that back way through Calamity. It felt like 50 miles by the time we got there and called our parents to come get us.

As a child, I was what some call precocious, and others called a brat. I was always full of wonderful ideas. If we decided to take a shortcut through a farmers freshly irrigated field in the pouring rain, that was probably my bright idea.

When we came home covered in mud, waterlogged, and three hours late and someone had to explain to our parents why our shoes were lost in a bog somewhere in the middle of that field, that was probably me again. I was always up for an adventure, and usually found someone to drag into that adventure with me.

There was you see, a logical explanation for everything. It made perfect sense when you looked at the world the way I did. I was almost 30 before I realized that most people don’t look at the world the way I do. This strange mixture of logic and emotion that guides my thought process even today.

I see the ugliness in the world around me, but I also see the possibilities. I always have. Hopefully I always will. There is so much negativity in this world, so many people who only want to bring you down. You have to hold on to the beauty in front of you or you will go insane.

As a child, Nucla felt like the only place in the world where you were free to be yourself. You could take a walk at midnight if you wanted to, and didn’t have to worry about perverts or being mugged. You could look up at the stars and actually see them.

You could believe that anything was possible, and that the world would always be so free, so bright, so full of hope. Maybe that wasn’t Nucla, after all, maybe that was just childhood. Riding your bike everywhere with the wind in your face. How could you feel anything but free?

Nucla is still the place that has grandma’s woodstove. There is little more comforting in this world than standing with my back to grandmas stove, feeling it warm my flesh through my jeans. There is little more comforting in this world than grandma’s house period.

Did the magic get lost, or did I just grow up?