Where I (Don’t) Go: Three Years in Northern Colorado

I Haven’t Left Larimer County Since Early 2020. It’s Taught Me How to Hear, Smell, and Feel at Home

In late September in northern Colorado, where the Rocky Mountains meet the plains in the traditional and ancestral lands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute Nations and peoples, the waist-high grasses turn golden and dry into muted shades of red, copper, violet, and blue. The wind comes more often from the north as each day holds more darkness. And as the wheel of the year turns, so do the grasses’ voices in the breeze: the soft pffhhh of June shifting to the louder shhhh of August, shifting now toward the …