Way back when

 

When my sister and I were teenagers, our mom worked as the cook at the Triple B Guest Ranch in Woodland Park, Colorado. Surprisingly, this old dude ranch is still in business, now called the "historic" Triple B Ranch and Event Center.

Looking at the photos, it hasn't changed that much, still with the same 1950's cabins and lodge. Even the bedspreads look the same!

 

 

Marji and I had summer jobs, along with some city girls from Chicago, cleaning rooms and serving the family style meals mom cooked for the guests and staff.

 

The teenage girls stayed in a dorm room on one side of the property, the wrangler boys on the other. Enough said.

We girls did domestic work, the boys were strictly horses and other outdoor stuff, except for one brainy kid who did dishes. One of our jobs was doing the guy's laundry, along with our own. Each girl was assigned one boy's dirty clothes. Sometimes you got lucky. Different time and place, that's for sure. 

We had a ball. We could ride, the food was good and there was even a swimming pool we were allowed to use occasionally. Naturally, there were sneaky midnight swims.

Well. You can just imagine the horsing around on a ranch with lightly-supervised teenagers. Back in those days, most adults were too busy with their own work and lives to pay much attention to kids, unless they got caught doing something really outrageous. 

They say the music we remember best is what we listened to between the ages of 12 and 22. Our brains undergo rapid development during that decade, and the music gets hard-wired into our minds. Even the songs we didn't like much become entangled with memories from our adolescence. 

I'm boring you with this because yesterday at our ukulele gathering we played the 1965 Zombie song, "She's Not There." I'm not crazy about rock classics on the ukulele, but it sure was fun and took me right back to the Triple B Ranch days, hanging out with those friends. That song was a big hit that summer.

What if someone had told me then that almost 60 years later, I'd be playing it on the ukulele, with a group of senior citizens at Seattle coffeehouse? What a long, strange trip it's been.

Easter weekend is here, with soaking rain on the way for us. April showers will hopefully, finally, bring some May flowers.

Have a lovely holiday, wherever you are.