Kenzie

Kenzie’s maternal grandmother was an international plant thief.

“She was known to travel between countries with plant cuttings stuck in her bra,” Kenzie shares. “This was before 9/11, so she’d stick them in her bra—and, you know, they’re not going to check old ladies’ bras. Her house was always full of plants.”

Kenzie moved to northern Colorado in January 2023. She was delighted this year to grow some rather plump heirloom tomatoes and watch her “magical” campanulas bloom. 

“It’s like a flower that you would find in a kid’s fairy book—like a little mouse sleeps in it.”

She didn’t inherit her green thumb from just one side of the family. Her dad grew up on a Michigan farm and developed a passion for plants. Whether Kenzie’s family found their home in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Panama, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, or the States, green was always poking out of pots and adorning windowsills.

Kenzie’s dad passed away suddenly a couple months before she came to Colorado. She and her husband, Kenneth, found out on their honeymoon. 

Besides Kenneth, Kenzie’s direct family members all live in California, just an hour-and-a-half drive away from one another. In a way, the distance dulls the pain. Her new house doesn’t carry any memories of her dad. But she also misses “living in the presence” of her support system. Sadness comes and goes. She doesn’t think of grief as a process.

“I like the analogy of grief being like butter in croissants. It’s first like a really solid block that slowly kind of gets worked into all the other layers of your life, and it’s kind of always there, but you couldn’t necessarily cut it and be like, ‘That’s specifically butter, and that’s like the rest of the ingredients.’ . . . You grow around the grief.”

Kenzie now works in public health for Larimer County. She loves using her background in communication and marketing, as well her Spanish, to help people.

“Everything that comes from our office is translated by me, and so it’s been a really cool connection to my roots and my mom’s roots to be able to do that. But on top of that . . . you kind of put your toe in the waters of many, many pools, and that’s something that my brain likes and keeps me happy. . . . I can be doing a translation of a chikungunya vaccine handout, and then I have to translate for this event—like make materials for this Perinatal Well-Being Coalition event—and then I go and do a social media post about public health.”

She wakes up at 5 a.m. each morning. Not because of her job or her plants. That’s when Finch, her new English Springer Spaniel, gets up. 

Training him, cleaning up after him, following his sleep schedule—“It’s very much taken over our life, but we don’t mind it,” Kenzie says. “ . . . He’s just really cute, too. It’s been easy whenever we’ve had people at the house doing maintenance or whatever—I think he gets away with a lot because he’s cute.”

A self-described third culture kid, Kenzie struggles to feel at home anywhere. But she’s growing roots here in Colorado, where the landscape makes her feel “like a teeny, tiny fragile human.”

“The magnitude of the universe and life around you is something that has recently become very present in my life.”