Affinity

Can one fall in love with a ghost?

No, Virginia: this ain’t a Wyethesque landscape painting. It’s the view out the back window of one of my favorite places—the Thomas the Apostle Retreat Center (TAC) in Cody, Wyoming where either myself or one of a half dozen or more of my colleagues at Denver Botanic Gardens (DBG) have led no end of field trips over the last few decades. I have stayed here a dozen, or perhaps more like 2 dozen times since the last Millennium. It’s become a touchstone of my life. Check out the view from the living room:

That’s Heart Mountain in the distance—looming over the Shoshone river valley. There are stunning views in all directions throughout the multi acre campus. Daphne Buchanan Grimes owned the ranch that became TAC and gifted it to the Episcopalian Church of Wyoming and Christ Church of Cody. Obviously a retreat center is dedicated primarily to religious (namely Episcopalian) retreats...but in true Anglican fashion, they have opened their doors a just a tad to other somewhat less scriptural pursuits—such as wildflower lovers coming to study and worship nature, as it were! DBG and TAC have forged a totally unofficial but precious partnership I will be celebrating in this post (as well as my personal story of discovering affinity with their benefactress). I have celebrated this remarkable places many times in Prairiebreak, one of my OTHER Social Media lifelines—check out this album about TAC that captures it on a much wetter year than this: A hunny of a bunnery.

I didn’t photoshop, A.I. or otherwise tinker with this shot I took years ago showing a rainbow emerging from some of the buildings at TAC—it’s spun this sort of magic ongoingly. I was charmed by the managers who I first worked with (Jay and Connie Moody) who first established our DBG relationship. They were succeeded by Robb and Rebekah Mason who inherited an even larger acreage and more buildings—and with whom we love working with as well. I anticipate there will be chances for you to join myself or my colleagues in future years, but this is all preamble to something peculiar that occurred to my yesterday when I last visited. I was now staying in the house Daphne lived in at the end—. I paused and actually started looking at a bookshelf in Daphne Buchanan Grimes’ home (the benefactress’ last home which she willed to expand TAC after her passing).

I am almost as book-obsessed as I am obsessed with plants. As I began looking at Daphne’s books, I realized we shared a peculiar affinity: I had actually read and possessed many of the books I saw on the shelves in the living room—and those I didn’t possess or have read, I would like to.

Here’s the clincher: I have a LOT of good friends with large libraries that occasionally share interests—especially with horticultural books. But Daphne’s books—like the Dostoevsky and Becket and Camus you see above—and others on other bookcases (lots of Lawrence Durrell, Chekhov, monographs on Penguins, on and on) were the sort of thing that shaped and forged my intellectual life as a youngster and growing adult. Every single book resonated. This is not something I’ve experienced before. One’s taste in Literature is a pretty powerful litmus test of affinity.

And then there were the lions…

Apparently at one point there were 230 of them. There are still a lot. Not everyone has an animal avatar: my beloved sister Eleni did (she collected ёжик [hedgehog in Russian]) Coincidentally, I gathered quite a few lions myself…although for once my predilection was modest compared to Daphne!

Books, avatars, tchotchkes—these are all signals, talismans of affinity. But when I consider the enormous attraction that TAC has held for me, the reverence I have for the views, the setting, the rooms and furnishings that are not as spare as one would imagine a retreat center possessing—in fact they are down right elegant! These are not just tokens but bonds.

For two decades I’ve been returning, again and again—and I am distressed to think that Daphne was alive for much of that time—living in this house next to the original TAC next door. She’d apparently become something of a hermit towards the end and didn’t welcome meeting strangers (who nevertheless were coming and going elsewhere on her ranch at her behest.)

Would our apparent affinity have borne the test of actual acquaintance face to face? Would we have become instant and deep friends? I will never know. But a little piece of me has stepped beyond affinity to something approaching infatuation. With a ghost.