Past, Present, Future

One hundred years ago next year, work started on the Mancos High School. A small group of us got together yesterday afternoon to figure out how to celebrate the centennial of the oldest continuously operating high school in Colorado; I took this evening picture of the school at the end of our meeting.

The year 1909 is engraved on the stone over the doorway, so that's an anchor for the celebration, but then it gets fuzzy. We decided to run the celebration from Mancos Days (which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2009) till graduation in May 2010 (that should be, we figure, the centennial class).

We're a little behind the curve already, but it sounds like it could be an interesting project, both for the school and for the community it serves.

Past, present, future will be the theme for the Mancos Days parade in July. The past (of the school) will take some sorting. The future will probably revisit some issues of the past, like consolidation. The present ... who knows what's going on? Maybe our situation will be clearer by July, for better or worse.

Just yesterday, I had people asking if they could clean up the brush piles on the property for firewood, do we have any yard work they could do, etc. Food banks are empty or running low; we're trying to figure out at Meeting how we can jump-start a special filling of the food boxes we usually do twice a year. 

We are looking forward to a small Thanksgiving dinner with a few friends and we will have much to be thankful for. Still, there will be a fearfulness hanging over our heads for Christmas, the New Year and beyond. tv