Just a Haircut?

by Tracey Flower

I got a haircut a few days ago.

It was possibly the most significant haircut I’ve ever gotten. Not because of the style—mid-length, long layers and Heidi Klum bangs—but because of what I saw when I looked in the mirror as I studied my stylist’s handiwork when I got home. The thought I had then materialized spontaneously and was unexpected but so wonderfully and warmly welcomed that I haven’t stopped smiling since I heard it.

I look like myself again.

What? How is that possible? When did I stop looking like myself?

Allow me to explain.

Me sans makeup but loving my new (old) 'do. 

I wrote in a post a little over a year ago that I didn’t recognize myself at that moment.

I have returned home in poor shape. I’ve lost weight and sleep and I have a bad cold. Every time I look in the mirror at the moment I’m shocked to see the person looking back at me. I don’t recognize her, she looks drained, this person, she looks pale and weary and it’s hard to believe this person is me, I wrote.

I wasn’t in a great place then. And I’ve come a long, long way since that moment. Happiness and I had a big beautiful reunion six months ago and we’ve been strong and steady since. Finding peace had nothing to do with my appearance—something I’ve mostly just maintained, rather than remark at, under layers of beanies, thermals and snowboard pants during the past six months of the snowiest winter in Vail’s history (524 inches!). And I’ve pretty much accepted happiness as a part of my life at this point (oh what a sweet life it is) so it surprised me that there was still another bright shiny ray of it to bask in.

A year ago right now my hair was long with shaggy overgrown bangs, all of it a bit too heavy. The color was my natural blonde. When, well, we all know what happened, I chopped it off (as you do when a relationship ends). Months later, after I reunited with Happy, I dyed it red because I felt like a dramatic change to mark the occasion. It’s been some hue of red, or at least dark strawberry blonde, all winter under all those beanies. About a month ago I took it back to my roots and headed toward a golden sunshiny blonde again. It had gotten longer over the winter, and a bit unruly. And since beanie season is pretty much over (no more hiding) I decided it was time to head to the salon.

Now here I am with those freshly chopped layers and Heidi Klum bangs, a style I rocked for awhile back before it got too long and I got sad and chopped it all off. And, well, there isn’t much more to say than I look like myself again. It might not seem like a big whooping deal, possibly not even significant enough to blog about, but it’s a pretty damn remarkable thing to me, a girl who just a year ago felt she didn’t recognize herself.

Practice Makes Perfect

by Tracey Flower

I have to admit something.

I don’t post on Flower Blog as much as I’d like to, or even as much as I know I should.

But I’m trying to do better.

(Ahhhh balance. Photo Credit)

My goal when I started Flower Blog was to post bi-weekly; two posts a month. Some months have sprouted more, some less and I’ve rarely, if at all, hit a stride with the bi-weekly thing. After two years I’m still very green in the world of blogging. I’ve still got a lot to learn and have a lot of growing to do. And I’m well aware that in order to achieve great success in the blogosphere I should most certainly post more frequently and more consistently.

Sometimes I procrastinate. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I’m just too lazy. And, sometimes, just when I think I’m getting close to hitting that stride, life happens and I miss a step. Like, for example, this past winter when I got an internship with the Vail Symposium. Yep, I’ve spent the past six months as a 28-year-old unpaid intern, a venture that has left me working six-day weeks—and sacrificing some of my evenings too—to write press releases, website copy, articles, and volunteering at programs. It’s been a crazy busy blur but paid off with my first by-lines in the Vail Daily (six of them in fact) and the satisfying knowledge that I’m working toward becoming more than just a bartender. I know Flower Blog fits in there somewhere, somehow, between working for money and working for passion, I’m just still trying to find my balance with all of it.

I’m going to keep working on finding my stride in this, my third year of blogging, with this posting thing. After all, third time’s the charm, right? And if I’ve learned anything from my Yoga practice it’s that the operative word is just that; practice. I’m not perfect but I’ll keep trying and keep doing the prep for each pose along the way and, eventually, I’ll conquer blogging (and maybe even a headstand).

In the meantime I need your help on a couple things.

I love and appreciate your comments so much and because of that I’d like to ask a couple favors. First if you’re a fellow writer or blogger and you have any advice that might help me find my blogging stride give me a holler and share the wealth of your experience. 


Second what should I write about next? I’d like to write some posts on topics you want to read about. Is there an old post on a subject you’d like to read more about? Is there an idea you’d like to hear me wrap my writing brain around? I’d like to know. So throw out some suggestions.

Flower Blog Turns Two

by Tracey Flower

Two years ago this month I started Flower Blog.

I did it to give myself a reason to write.

I always write in my journal and often jot down ideas. My computer is full of half-started attempts at stories, both fiction and non, but two years ago I was starting to feel as though none of it had a purpose, and without a purpose nothing was ever finished; no documents completed, no ideas fanned out. I was just plain slacking as a writer. I needed something to hold me accountable. Over the last two years Flower Blog has done just that.

As I look back through the past two years of posts I can see how I’ve changed and grown since April 2009. In the first year I posted only finished, polished versions of essays I’d started since I’d moved to Vail. Fanning out all those half-started attempts was my original intention with Flower Blog, and not a bad one; that first year produced some of my all-time favorite posts such as Romanian Mami and Jump.

But as I learned more about the wonderful world of blogging (and as I ran out of pre-polished essays to refine) I started to re-think my approach and starting pushing myself to write more candidly about what I was thinking and feeling and to just talk to my readers about my life instead of focusing on trying to create magnificent written masterpieces. In One Sunset at a Time, posted a year ago this month, I think I started to hit my stride.

And then something really remarkable happened in the last year. I found my voice. It came to me out of anguish, out of heartache. It came to me as I scrawled frantically in my journal in the middle of the afternoon when I was too tired and too heavy to cry anymore but still had more emotions to expel. It came to me in my darkest moment and was, to my surprise, still there when I was ready to let the sun shine in again.

As I look back through the past two years of posts I can see where I’ve been and where I’m at now, I can relive stories and recall emotions. I find comfort in these memories (oddly even in the awkward ones). Reading through these posts is like looking at a great big photo album. And, while, having a reason to write has made this blog a worthwhile venture, having my life documented in this way, and sharing it with my readers, is pretty damn priceless.

My top five faves from the last year:

A Little Thanks (December 2010)
Home is where the Moon Sets (May 2010)
On Goals, Forgiveness, and Turning 28 (September 2010)
My Book Café (May 2010)
On Soul Mates and Being Broken (November 2010)


What is your favorite Flower Blog post from the last year?

Of All the Places I've Lived (in Vail)

by Tracey Flower

In the spirit of apartment hunting, taking stock of my life and my pending six-year anniversary with Vail, I’d like to share a list of all the places I’ve lived since I’ve been here. A list that, in writing it, I realized tells the story of my time here, of where I’ve been, who I was and how I’ve grown.

All the place I have lived (in Vail):

• May 2005-May 2006: My first home in Vail was Timber Ridge Unit N5. (NOTE: Timber Ridge is Vail Resorts employee housing and dirt-cheap because it’s dirty, old and likely to crumble at any moment. Also fondly known by nicknames such as The Ghetto and Timber Ritz, I’ve mostly bopped around units in this complex as the location and the price fit my needs to a T. Yes I get made fun of for it. Yes I’m slightly embarrassed to get off at the bus stop here. But at least the rent doesn’t break me.) This is still the address listed on my Colorado driver’s license and I was once refused a Town of Vail Library card because I had since moved from that address but never changed my license. I lived in that unit with three guys and it was quite the experience for someone who had up until that point lived with mostly women.
• May 2006-November 2006: I moved into a two-bedroom condo in Simba Run, just down the road from Timber Ridge, with three of my girlfriends. It had a washer/dryer (jackpot!) in the unit and a pool and gym on the premise. We may have been twenty-something’s sharing bedrooms but we felt like we were living the highlife.
• November 2006-November 2008: Timber Ridge Unit I8. The longest I’ve lived in one place since living in my parent’s house and I’m quite sure the longest anyone’s ever lived in the same Timber Ridge unit. Almost all of my closest girlfriends in Vail lived with me in that unit at one time or another, and our second winter in I8 marks the only six months when we were all single at the same time. Some of my favorite adventures in Vail housing moments happened in that unit.
• November 2008-February 2009: Timber Ridge Unit K3. I lived here with two guys, one of whom was my boyfriend. He broke up with me. I moved out. End of story.
• February 2009-April 2009: Timber Ridge Unit C5. This was the unit my friends were forced to move into when the house they were renting in West Vail caught fire one night. The fire destroyed the home and most of their belongings. I moved in, devastated, a few months later when my boyfriend and I broke up. We weren’t thrilled to be living in that place, it was crowded and the reasons we were there were lousy, but I must say at least we all had a place to go. 
• April 2009-November 2009: My girlfriends and I moved out of C5 and into a townhome in the Telemark Condos. By far the biggest and nicest place I’ve lived since my parent’s house, it was a relief and a treat to be there after the winter we had all had. It had three bedrooms, three bathrooms and a washer/dryer. It had something like four floors and there was a pool on the premise. This was the only time in my life that I have had my own bathroom.  Alas, it was only a six-month lease and at 2,400 buckaroos a month (800 of those my responsibility) not really affordable. It was also the reason for the great landlord security deposit debacle of 2009, but that’s another story for another time.
• November 2009-April 2010: Timber Ridge Unit K14. With all my former roomies either shacked up with their significant others or moved away, I was left to fend for myself so I sucked it up and went for the cheapest option for a room. I ran into a friend I knew through work when signing my lease and he moved in to the unit’s second bedroom. I’ve had better and worse roommates than this one but it was, in all, a pleasant living experience (and a huge weight off my wallet after that pricy condo). 
• May 2010: Month of my botched move to Australia. I packed up my life and squeezed it into the world’s tiniest storage unit and whatever didn’t fit I gave away. I loaded up my oversized bags and headed home to Michigan, where I had planned to spend two weeks with friends and family before departing for Australia, where I was going to live for at least the next year. As we all know it turns out life had absolutely no regard for those plans and after a confusing, frustrating, upside down, life-changing month I was back in Vail.
• June 2010-present: Timber Ridge Unit K14. And home again? My roommate was still in this unit when I returned, and still had all the stuff I had given him that wouldn’t fit in my storage unit, so I moved back in and reclaimed my stuff and my space (and, eventually, my life). He moved out about a month later and I enjoyed a summer of living alone before the housing office gave me two brand new roommates. It hasn’t been the most pleasant living arrangement ever but I’ve made it work and now I’m looking forward to what’s next, both in the world of apartments and for my life in general. 

What stories do the places you've lived have to tell?

Six Months at a Time

by Tracey Flower

As another season comes to an end here in Vail, it’s time to take stock of my life and solidify my plans for work and housing for the next six months. In May I will have lived in Vail for six years. In that time I’ve moved from one apartment to another nine times, and I’m getting ready to do it again.

Such is the life when you live in a place where rent costs a small fortune. I remember a conversation a few years ago with a friend who lives in Michigan about rent. She was shocked when she realized my room in a small condo was more than the monthly price tag on the house she and her husband were renting, 200 bucks more in fact. I envied her for a fleeting moment, and then I looked out my window at the Gore Range and remembered that steep rent is a small price to pay to live in paradise. As I tell bar patrons who regularly ask me how one affords to live here, you have to really love the lifestyle and not mind being a little bit poor.

Home sweet home with the Gore Range in view

While I’ve managed to consistently, if only barely sometimes, make ends meet in my six years here in Vail I must admit that re-configuring my life every six months becomes a pain sometimes, especially the moving part. But even as I daydream about finding that sweet spot in the world of high country housing, where long-term leases exist in harmony with reasonable rent and wonderful roommates (because, let’s be honest, few folks make enough to afford their own places around these parts), I wonder if I’m ready for such a commitment.

I’ve realized (happily) that Vail’s my home and I have no intention of leaving anytime in the near future. But I must admit I experience a small panic at the end of each winter and summer here, when seasonal jobs end and decisions about where to live need to be made, when everything’s flying up in the air around me, waiting for me to pull it all into place. But when it all comes together (and it always comes together) I feel such sweet relief that I have a plan, even if it is only for another six months. I almost feel incapable of planning my life out any farther than that. Perhaps that’s immature for a 28-year-old. Perhaps some of it comes from my botched plans to move to Australia. Whatever it is I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I’ve realized, however immature it seems or stressful it may be at times, that taking life six months at a time works for me, at least at this point in my life.


Check out my next post for a list of all the apartments I've lived in since I moved to Vail.

Just a Small Town Girl

by Tracey Flower

I really am a small town girl, although it’s a label I’ve only recently learned to embrace (or even accept). When I was in college (hell until just a few months ago) I was convinced that I would have to move to a city at some point. To grow up. To move on. To make something of myself. I mean, Carrie Bradshaw’s “Sex and the City” column would have most definitely not made sense in, say, a little resort town somewhere. I felt especially compelled to make a big move this past summer when my life was all twisted around and turned upside down. After my plans to move to Australia fell through my plan was to come back to Vail just to get my head together, to get my life together, and then move on to something bigger and better. But a funny thing happened as I worked through my grief and found happiness again, I found contentment in this place I call home and instead of resisting it, instead of telling myself I should want something else or something more, I gave into it.

Vail: A small town with big views

Giving into small town contentment has relieved an anxiety I didn’t even know existed in me until it was gone. I love living in this small town, I really really do. I like day-tripping to Denver and visiting cool quirky cities like San Francisco and Melbourne. And whenever I have a rant about tourists (or, ahem, guests as Vail Resorts prefers us to say) my dad oh so gently reminds me that I grew up in a resort town and well, what did I expect moving to another resort town. Why did I move from one small resort town to another? I suppose, simply, because it fits. Because somehow I think in my deepest gut I’ve always known when I visit a city that it doesn’t fit in the same way, because if I’m being really honest (and I finally am) cities are great places to visit but I don’t want to live in Denver or even Melbourne.

Perhaps part of why I can embrace my small-town contentment is because Vail has little bits and pieces that fulfill the bits and pieces of me that crave city life. There’s music, art and culture to be found here and what this town lacks in diversity, alright well there’s actually no redemption there, this town could use a little diversity. I was recently in Crested Butte and I found myself enamored with that town’s rustic charm, there’s something about it that just feels more authentically Colorado than Vail. There’s no hint of Disneyland in Crested Butte, no plastic-y fancy resort feel. As I wandered around a used book store/coffee shop in the Butte I found myself, just for a moment, wishing Vail had a little more quirk to it. But then I returned home and joined my girlfriends for a fancy cocktail at the new hotspot in town, Frost. This posh lounge feels modern and fresh, like something one might find in, yep you guessed it, a city (a locale that wouldn’t be caught dead in a town like Crested Butte). I realized then that perhaps my small-town contentment might just be contentment with making Vail my home. In one day here I can go for a hike in the middle of nowhere, see a concert with my favorite people, and drink cosmos in a swanky new bar just like the one and only Carrie Bradshaw. Vail has bits and pieces of small-town mountain charm but also has tastes of city life that, frankly, towns like Crested Butte (and my hometown of South Haven, Michigan) don’t.

I think, though, more than anything else my contentment with my small town status comes from realizing that I have, in fact, done a lot of growing up in the last year. And a lot of moving on. And when it comes to making something of myself, well, I had my first article (and byline!) in the Vail Daily this week, not to shabby at all.

This One's for the Girls

by Tracey Flower

“Don’t laugh at me but maybe we could be each other’s soul mates. And then we could let men be just these great nice guys to have fun with.” ~Sex and the City’s Charlotte on soul mates

I’ve been thinking again lately about the phrase “soul mates”. I saw a re-run of Grey’s Anatomy the other day where Meredith (Grey, the Grey in Grey’s) called Christina (her best girlfriend) her “soul mate” and Derrick (aka McDreamy, Meredith’s husband) “the love of my life”. This makes sense to me and is right along my line of thinking when it comes to that weighty phrase.

Girls just wanna have fun: myself and a few of my ladies

It’s no secret that friendships between women are unique. Any of that catty crap and mean girl-ness aside, when women form a bond it sticks and it holds across miles, hours, and oceans. Friendships shared between women are unlike any other relationship. There is a level of understanding, of comfort, of intimacy in these relationships that we don’t share with our boyfriends or even our mothers. We share everything from clothes to mascara (even though most women’s magazines say you shouldn’t, due to germs and stuff I guess) to deep dark secrets. We fight. We say things that are very honest and sometimes very awful. We yell and then we don’t talk for days. When we do talk again we know that what we’ve got here is one very solid, very genuine friend. We pop bottles of champagne at the premier of Sex and the City: The Movie and understand that that show was always as much, or perhaps even more so, about the relationship between those four women as it was about their relationships with men.

When I got that fateful message back in May that would change the course my life was on at that moment (yep the one from The Guy) the first person I called was my friend Claire. Now, it wasn’t long before I was racking up phone minutes to each and every one of my lovely ladies, my soul mates if you will, and sobbing in my parent’s kitchen to my dad, but first I had to call Claire. I needed someone who would understand both the emotional sucker punch I felt and my desperate desire to still hold that relationship and myself together in that moment. I needed to talk to someone who had been with me every single uneven cobble stone step of the way during that relationship. I needed someone who would listen and be levelheaded, someone who would support me but not hesitate to question me if she thought I was making a mistake, and who would never say I told you so because chances are she never even thought it because she trusts my judgment and supports me to a fault. I needed to call that person who is nearly impossible to track down on the phone, who often doesn’t respond to a text for days, but who called back the second she got my voicemail because, I’m quite sure, she knew exactly what I needed from her without me saying so. If that’s not a soul mate, I don’t know what is. (And I called her again, sad and lonely and desperate, a couple weeks later from Melbourne as I fell apart and wrestled with the decision to stay there or go home).

I’ve had two serious relationships and at one point during each of them I thought it would last forever. Neither of them did. In the wake of the end of my last relationship I did a lot of kicking and screaming and feeling sorry for myself as one by one more and more of my girlfriends got paired off and married.

And then I got over it. For me life got a whole hell of a lot easier when I admitted that I don’t believe in the idea of “The One”, that I hadn’t missed my fate with either of those failed relationships, and that I had better take the time to find and invest in all the other wonderful bits and pieces of life that fulfill me because, well, frankly that’s the only way I’m ever going to feel complete. That, and I realized that in my girlfriends I already have several very near and dear soul mates nailed down (you know who you are).


And you? Who are your soul mates?