Occasionally, old memories come flooding back...by the bucket full. I wanted to know a bit more about a favorite cousin-by-marriage, Katherine "Kitty" Holt of Matheson, Colorado. Having connected with the maternal side of my mother Lois' family, I remembered slides taken in 1983 of the Holt Ranch ruins on a last visit to see Kitty. Finding them, a painting had to be done.
Decades back, the Holt Ranch was, as one said, "a going operation!" Matheson is the first town west of Limon, Colorado on Highway 24. The ranch was due north of Matheson and just east on Highway 86.
In November of 2013, I went outside and it struck me that the lighting in the fall sky as it bounced off the landscape was almost the same as it was 30 years earlier, nearly 230 miles west of where I was standing that afternoon in Hill City, Kansas. Kind of spooky how memories can work. I made a few mental notes and it might as well have been a plein air painting.