1992 - A designing woman, home deliveries, settling in on Conifer Mountain; Daycare angst
Click on the arrows below to open each topic
Although the house was ideal, it was 30 miles from Denver. A 5000-foot 19-mile canyon descent, 2-lanes those days, cars sported bumper stickers that read “285 Road Warrior“. Increasingly, Linda’s trips up and down the “hill” became a bit of a drag. Despite her rolling up hundreds-of- thousands of miles in her own drives over the years, she began to develop greater caution, even understandable apprehension about driving through the Colorado winter snows and ice.
Finding daycare didn’t make things easier, and Linda expressed a certain amount of distress at leaving Alia and Jared at “the Yellow Barn”. But life overall was good, great even.
A Colonel Bradford from South Carolina post-Civil War established the first stage line in the Denver mountains, right in Confer, which became “The Yellow Barn”. Was this a progenitor of Paul’s (his pre-marriage family name WAS Bradford)? Were they in fact related?
It didn’t matter. Substandard for a young just-past infant child and for a special-needs son, Linda attempted as she did always to balance her job and career interests with care for the children. The psychic confluence or coincidence seemed appropriate, but the daycare was not, and they yanked Jared and Alia out of there in short order. They found a Montessori school for Alia, then Linda with persistent pressure as always succeeded in getting Jared mainstreamed into the local school system.
The battle, however, seemed never-ending. Linda never flagged though undoubtedly over the years it eroded her determination, with a certain resignation or practical acceptance of what could NOT be done for her precious offspring. But she kept trying, as admirable a trait as any of the abundant virtues she manifested.