Palisade Person Mae Ryan loves family, friends & memories

           Mae Ryan is finally getting out of her house and back around town. The cold weather, snow and health issues have kept this octogenarian homebound from her regular visits around town during the first months of this year.

            This 15-year resident of Palisade loves getting out to see her family and friends, but most of all she loves to talk, to tease and to be independent in so many ways.

            “I’m still able to drive myself. In Palisade. I don’t want to, and my son does not want me to drive in Grand Junction,” she admits.  So instead of staying home doing nothing, Mae is starting a new project

She read about Lisa’s Scrapbooking Boutique opening on Main Street, and here she is, getting her granddaughter Rachel’s school photos and mementoes organized and arranged in a scrapbook before May.

            “She is graduating from Doane College in Nebraska,” Mae said proudly. “I’ve never been to Nebraska, so I don’t know where her college is located. But I want to get this done before she comes home.

            “I love to decorate and do stuff like this, but this may be too much for me, so Lisa said she would help.”
            “Of course I will help,” Lisa Horn says as she separates Mae’s pile of pictures and paper notes, cards, and child-like drawings, the sweet misspelled, crooked pieces of love messages from a youngster to her adoring grandparent.

            Their concentration on sorting everything by date is interrupted by happy voices of more customers coming into the shop. Lisa greets her friends by introducing, “Hi, you all, this is Mae. Everybody knows Mae.”

Lisa introduced her neighbor Kristin Turner and her mother Virginia Johnson who came to the boutique to pick out paper for Kristin’s next project.

Eighty-four year old Mae is not shy about meeting and greeting new friends. She will talk to anyone, anytime, any place she meets people, but she has to be talked into telling anything about herself.

She does not divulge details about her 84 years of life freely, until she feels that she is among friends.

 “I was born in Colorado Springs. When I was a senior in high school with one month before graduation, my dad moved us to Leadville. I had to graduate after being there only one month.” She remembers that well, but she married a young man who was born in Leadville and had two sons before the family lived in Lakewood until her husband died.

Kristin and Virginia exclaimed that they too had lived in Lakewood, so they chatted on about familiar places and changes since Mae lived there. Now that she had new friends, Mae told more about her life.

She buried him in Leadville and would go back to visit his grave and decided to stay.” When her sons were grown, she bought an old Victorian home and remodeled it by herself, or as she said, “I paid for everything to be done, and it was in the Historical home tours.”

Mae enjoyed the independence in Leadville, her friends, jobs in the stores and the house. She “loved it there,” but she moved on to Palisade because her family needed her.

“I came here to babysit my granddaughter,” she explained her move, but ironically she continued making new friends, taking care her granddaughter over the years, and decorating her houses.

            Since her arrival in the Valley she has moved and fixed up three different homes. She lived in a small mobile home, to a double wide, and now in a three room building that her family and friends calls “the Quilt house” because it was the former Quilt fabric store. Mae feels too old to fix up another house and has no intention to move again.

            Her best Palisade friends Nancy and Tom Kessenich probably know Mae better than any one else, except Melinda Eastland who owns Mumzul’s Crumpets, Tea and Cones Shop on Main Street.

According to Nancy, their friendship began when Mae Ryan first moved into town. “We were working in Melinda’s antique store on the corner. Melinda added a coffee shop up front.  Mae likes antiques so she came in, started talking, and instant friends.”

Their talking, teasing and laughter continued when Melinda closed her store and opened the Mumzul’s shop behind the store that is now The Blue Pig. That’s where Lisa Horn met Mae.

“Everyone knows Mae. She is such a fun person.

“Each time she enters Mumzel’s, Tom breaks out in song,

Hello, My Honey. Hello, my baby. Hello, my ragtime gal . . .”

This makes Mae light up in smiles and start talking and teasing to any one and every one in her friend’s teashop.”

The Kesslenichs had many stories of Mae’s wit and camaraderie.

 “A few years ago, a bear came down the Mesa and climbed up one of her trees,” Nancy recalled Mae version, “He had a plastic bag stuck on his claw, and Mae called and said, ‘I didn’t know how that white bag was going up that tree,’ then she saw it was a bear.”

“She asked me if she should lock her door. I told her, ‘I don’t think he is going to knock.” Tom replied.  They have laughed many times over that story.

            “Mae is not a talker-talker,” Tom said, and then explained, “She talks a lot, but doesn’t reveal a lot about herself.”

            That’s part of the independent nature of Mae Ryan.

            “I talk more than my son, but we are private people.” She keeps repeating, but she will tease you, give you advice, joke with you, make you laugh, and keep saying, “This is just between you and me.”

            When her new friends left, Mae and Lisa went back to her granddaughter’s childhood photos, but this 84-year-old mused, “Lisa’s shop is so cute. It is clever, and she has done such a nice job.

            “Palisade, it’s a wonderful, quiet small town. We need more businesses. We don’t have much going on, and because we have so little I would like people to go to our places.  If we don’t, and we take everything to Grand Junction, we’ll never grow.”

But that was enough to talk about: the town, the shop, her project. She looks up with a smile. “What are you scribbling down? Don’t write about me. Remember this is just between you and me.”

Her personal life—those stories--her friends have to learn in bits and pieces from her actions and what other friends tell about her. 

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