Nancee Isler Klausmeyer

Our mother, Nancee Klausmeyer, was a gardener.

She grew souls.

We remember the garden she grew from clay soil, littered with tumbleweeds blowing around the north side of our brick house in LaPorte. She composted. She rototilled. She started seeds in February. And she grew beautiful tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, lettuces and a myriad of squashes by September. Our mother grew food from the worst dirt imaginable. She did this because growing things was her purpose.

Our mother was a gardener. She loved being a mother. She loved each of her children, although not each of them knew the same kind of love from her. Her children were also her job, her purpose, her identity, her garden. Not all of her children appreciated being a squash, or a tomato, or a potato to dig up. But, seeds from her soul they were. Often our mother would say, "I am a mother!" at times when her children's desires NOT to be mothered precipitated this response. But she couldn't unlearn this instinct. She grew things.

She mothered.

She instructed.

She tethered.

But, above all she never relinquished being Mom.

Whether accepted, welcomed, appreciated, honored, or even sometimes rebuffed, her motherly ways persisted.

Our mother was a gardener.

When she moved to a secluded house in Rist Canyon (rocky soil, no water, not intended for crops) she nevertheless carved a garden out of a hillside. Daily and usually in the morning, she trekked to her beautiful garden plot (with a most amazing view!) to irrigate, prune and harvest. She both loved the solitariness of that time and she craved a companion- a fellow gardener, perhaps. Gardeners love gardeners, we suppose.

Mom left Rist Canyon to live at a new community called Sunflower in Fort Collins. She was the first person to buy a home in Sunflower and thus moved onto yet another patch of bare dirt ground where, for her, the soil was like a palette onto which she could grow flowering shrubs, trees, perennials and annual flowering plants. And she did exactly this, creating an oasis of color, texture and bloom.

Our mother was a gardener, until the end. When Mom was unable to continue to live independently, she gave up her beautiful Sunflower home and garden and moved to North Shore Health and Rehabilitation in Loveland. One lovely aspect of North Shore is their mature courtyard gardens which gift successive blooms all summer long. Wandering and wheeling through the gardens there brought Mom great joy.
After all, our mother was a gardener.

Our mother was also a teacher, an artist, a feminist, a counselor, a cook, a critic and a hitching post. She was all these things, and maybe- probably- more. But she was, at least, all these and we loved her. She left behind many beautiful gardens, including us, her gratitude-filled daughters: Jackie Klausmeyer of Bellvue, Colorado; Karen Whitchurch of Rosemount, Minnesota & Linda Klausmeyer Thiel of Berthoud, Colorado.