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Aspen Princess: Like, this Trump guy is making me nervous

Alison Berkley Margo
The Aspen Princess

As much as I love it, this warm weather is kind of freaking me out.

I feel like the Earth is just too hot, like when you wake up in the middle night and the back of your knees are sweating. I worry about what it’s going to be like this summer if it’s this warm now. What’s it going to be like in July? What’s it going to be like in July 10 years from now?

This is also the second year in recent memory we’ve had awesome snow in January and then boom, nothing. Is it just me, or is winter getting shorter and shorter every year? It doesn’t seem like something that’s happening slowly, either. It feels as if the rise of our temperatures is accelerating at an alarming rate.



The snow started to melt in Basalt in February, which is why I was so unprepared when I took Gertie for a hike up Arbaney and didn’t even think to bring a towel to clean her muddy paws. Considering she’s like, 6 inches tall and (sorry, baby girl) a little on the chubby side, her belly will occasionally drag along the ground when you consider the steep pitch and the occasional puddle. I’m trying to navigate this with a 21-pound baby on my back, looking for every little pebble or patch of dry dirt I can get purchase on. We make it out alive, but the dog is filthy, and I have no choice but to put her in the car, as tying her to the car door handle and making her run is not really an option.

I put her in the way back, but pugs can summon miraculous power and agility when they are incentivized to do so. We’re talking about a dog that lays around all the livelong day and takes the idea of “lap dog” to extremes by always insisting that her little, round, bread loaf-shaped body be pressed against mine at all times. That means we literally spoon every single night as she burrows under the covers, does a 180 and then somehow manages to nestle herself in my arms, her tiny head on my shoulder. Co-sleeping, what?




During the day, she puts in some serious lap time, whether I’m at my desk or on the couch or wherever. I’ve totally given up on trying to get her off my lap. She wedges her little butt into my seat and arranges herself in such a way that I hardly notice that she’s there. I know, I know.

So when I threw her in the way back she somehow managed to leap high enough into the air to clear the back seat and then go for the second gap jump from the back seat into the front seat over the armrest that I had raised to keep her from doing exactly that. So by putting her in the way back in an attempt to contain the mud fest, I’d now invited her to leave mud in virtually every nook and cranny of the car.

Don’t get me wrong, it made for a great Instagram post that day and I am always looking for new material. Gertie has almost 2,400 followers and counting (@GertieGoogleEyes) and managing her social media is a lot more fun than doing my own. People go nuts over her, especially because all the posts are from her point of view, lisp and all. The photo of her in the front seat of my Mini Cooper with mud everywhere got 116 likes. My photos never get that many.

You get the idea. What was I talking about, again? Oh, yeah, climate change.

Since November, it feels like the world as we know it is in a very precarious state on so many levels, and yet my mind wanders from very dark places into the inane chatter of everyday life.

Like, I think about how during World War II there were well-educated, cultured, successful professionals all over Europe who didn’t see the Nazis coming. They never imagined their privileged lives could be taken away from them, just like that. It makes me very nervous that I haven’t seen war in my lifetime, at least not one that required a draft or affected people in my life directly. What’s to say it can’t happen to me?

And now we have a president who seems determined to sabotage our government by appointing people to run agencies they are dead set against, people who have no experience in government and people who have corporate interests. He continues to behave like a petulant child with access to a Twitter account (God, I wish Twitter would shut down his account. Has it occurred to them that it might protect the safety of the entire world?), not to mention access to the nuclear codes. Every day it’s another horrifying news cycle, as if yesterday’s news couldn’t get any worse. I’m the furthest thing from a conspiracy theorist, but am I the only one who thinks this guy is clearly trying to destroy our government?

And yet, I am complacent. I think about my pug, and what I’m going to do about my muddy car while the world as I know it feels like it could be in serious danger. What kind of future will there be for my son? Will he get to enjoy a powder day on Highland Bowl on his 47th birthday?

Right or wrong, denial is the only way I know how to survive. Because if I think about all this stuff too much, or for too long, I’d never get any sleep at night. So for now, I’m grateful for muddy paws and dirty diapers and the song of my son’s laughter.

And if it could snow at least one more time this season, that would make me feel a lot better — even it means more mud.

The Princess wants to wish Gertrude Angel Margo a happy fourth birthday. Email your love to alisonmargo@gmail.com.