The Little Wren Shop · Morrison, Colorado
The Sanctuary
A place to pause. To bring your family. To capture a moment.
Rolf and Ginny Paul created a sanctuary. It was their yard. It belonged to everything that lived there.
When Rolf died in January 2002, Krista stood up at his funeral and — looking for the word for what her father had made of that piece of land — used the word sanctuary. The word stuck, because it was accurate. He had spent three decades tending a yard where deer, birds, squirrels, and raccoons were welcome to linger. He set out a child’s bathtub at night and a mother raccoon would bring her babies to drink and bathe. He took the family Christmas tree, once its indoor life was over, out onto the deck and tied peanut-butter-and-birdseed balls to its branches — a second life as a winter feeder. His bird feeders were never empty. And inside, at his drafting desk, a single small spider was allowed to live in a toy firetruck that sat there. He would stop, sometimes, to watch her weave — admiring, as a maker himself, the precision of her work. And from the windows of the office where he worked, he would look up and watch hawks ride the thermals over the hogback and town. Stillness was not empty there either. It was full.
Ginny shared every bit of it. For thirty years she ran the Morrison Country Store in the same spirit — a place where you were seen and welcomed and not rushed. When Rolf passed, Ginny joined the Town Board herself and kept his work going. She lived the same quiet ethic until she died in 2020. The sanctuary was theirs, together.
In the words Krista used in her eulogy for her father: “This tiny wisp of a town — he loved it more than he could ever say. He made it his life’s work to protect it.” The Sanctuary at The Little Wren Shop takes its name from exactly that — the small, unshowy thing worth protecting. The thing you tend until it outlasts you.
In 2001, as Rolf was dying, a large buck came to the yard and stayed. Not once — steadily, for months. Krista’s daughter Vivian, just a toddler, would go out to meet him. In the scrapbook Krista was keeping for her young daughters at the time, she wrote, in her own hand: “Opa created a sanctuary for animals in his backyard.” The word, again, from her. The deer felt it too.
At Atlanta Market, while planning the shop, Krista came around a corner and saw two cast iron stags. She wasn’t looking for them. She hadn’t been planning anything like them. But she stopped, and stood, and knew — without knowing why — that they had to come home with her. She bought them on the spot. They now stand at the east side of the building, with a ledge where families can sit and have their picture taken. She thought of it, at the time, as a beautiful moment, a Morrison thing. Then she found the scrapbook page. And she understood what she had actually been doing.
The Sanctuary is a tribute to Rolf and Ginny Paul — expressed not in words, but in the language they spoke. Nature. Stillness. A place where things were tended with care, and where people felt welcome to linger.
Bring your family. Take your picture. Stay a little while.
Through the Eyes of a Child
A scrapbook page Krista was keeping for her young daughters in those months, in her own handwriting: “Opa created a sanctuary for animals in his backyard — squirrels, birds, raccoons and even deer lingered in the yard.” Vivian, age two, with the buck that came to the yard and stayed. The page records what everyone in the family knew: the sanctuary was real long before it was ever named.
And then, on the day.
The afternoon I finished writing about The Sanctuary — and decided to call it that — two does walked into my yard and stayed. They lay down. My dogs barked. They didn't move. They lingered, gazed, settled deeper into the grass. Hours passed. They were still there. A third came later, alone, and met the camera directly. My dad spent thirty years tending a place where deer were welcome to linger. The afternoon I named that practice — and gave it a permanent home at the shop he loved — the deer came to my yard, and stayed.
The Birds He Watched. The Birds He Made.
He watched birds from his office window. He drew them constantly, from memory and observation.
The same eye and hand went everywhere — into his sketchbooks, his printmaking, his stained glass studies, his civic design work. The wren at the top of every page of this site is his.
At The Sanctuary
The Sanctuary
In memory of Rolf and Ginny Paul — who served, created, and cared, because they loved this town.
This is the text on the small sign at The Sanctuary — outside at the east side of the shop, where the stags stand and families come to take their picture. No dates. No biography. The people of Morrison will know. The visitors will feel it.
Your Moments Here
Bring your family. Take your picture.
The Sanctuary is for everyone who comes to The Little Wren Shop. Sit on the stags — children climb, grown-ups perch on the ledge between them. Take your time. Capture the moment. Share it with us.
Your photos may be shared here — a growing gallery of Morrison moments.