When autumn rolled around during our first year in Amarillo, we were starving for sweeping mountains of bright color. We were missing autumn in east Tennessee and there were only a few older neighborhoods in Amarillo that had the kind of trees we wanted to see. On what felt like a whim, we packed up the kids and escaped to Durango, Colorado, in search of fall foliage and to ride the Narrow Gauge Railroad to Silverton.
The road to Durango wasn’t as colorful as we anticipated, but we eventually found what we were looking for.
Look at these sweet babies: Jeremy had just turned six and Jack was three.
To be honest, I don’t miss these days. Not fully, anyway. While there were handfuls of good moments and some memories that I cherish, the greatest impact of those years is to serve as perspective. They are useful to me that way. They are a reminder of difficulty and challenge and how we made the best of it. They also remind me to be ever grateful for the place we’re in right now.