I remember the last time I ever attended a social function in that schoolhouse (it was used on Sundays for church meetings and Sunday school and for special community socials). That last time was the farewell party of my cousin, who was leaving on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The room was full of familiar faces. I was a grown man, then, and in college. And many of the people who had been young in the days of my schooling in Fruita were then old. But we played the same of games, sang the same old songs, and enjoyed them just as we had back when I was a first grader there.

And as I gaze down on the tranquility of green, foliage-lined Sulphur Creek and the Fremont River. I can still hear the echoes of the tremendous, thundering, rock-rolling and pounding floods that overflowed the creek channel after a cloud burst in the Upper Country. Those floods always scared the heck out of me.

Most of the people I knew in those days are gone now – gone to explore and settle other lands in the hereafter – my mother, my father, Uncle Cass and Aunt Marie Mulford, Dicey and Will Chestnut, Clarence Chestnut and his cousin Glenn, Dan Adams, old Brother and Sister Jorgensen, Nell Gifford. They're all gone, but their voices, their laughter, and their weeping– in times that were both good and bad, still linger in the echoes of the ledges of Fruita.

Clay Robinson