On a corner of a Colorado Springs neighborhood, at the edge of a busy intersection on the city’s north side, a woman in a blow-up costume dances and waves to traffic.

The costume of choice this day is a patriotic eagle, matching the dozen Fourth of July-themed inflatables standing in Dana Huff’s yard. ‘Tis the season. ‘Tis always the season at the Huff Holiday House, as neighbors have come to know it.

“They go all out,” says a passerby, T.J. Stevens, walking with his kids toward Cottonwood Creek Park.

All out especially for Christmas and Halloween. “You can hardly walk around the yard,” Dana says.

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Those months of ghoulish creatures and jolly characters give way to massive hearts for Valentine’s Day, followed by leprechauns for St. Patrick’s Day, followed by big, colorful eggs for Easter. The inflatables shine in the night, along with the house, strung in lights that change color throughout the year.

Red, white and blue inflatables take over the Huffs’ yard this time of year. The holiday-less weeks ahead typically see some mix of inflatables — perhaps a dragon here and a unicorn there, maybe Santa here and a giant pumpkin there.

“She probably has over 40 or 50,” says Dana’s husband, Rich.

And she has several inflatable, bouncy costumes. As kids ride the bus to nearby schools or head to the park down the street, they might find Dana dressed as a dinosaur, a bumblebee, a Thanksgiving turkey or an Easter bunny. Today, it’s the eagle.

Drivers honk as they pass. Some stop to roll down the window; a young fan wants a high-five. Others stop on foot, like Stevens with his excited kids.

“Thank you for doing this,” he says.

The pleasure is the Huffs’.

Dana dresses up and dances and waves while Rich often films her for another video to post on the social media pages she started not long ago. Why not spread joy to the digital world, too? they figured.

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That’s what the Huff Holiday House is all about — spreading joy. Thanks come from people passing by and others commenting online. Others have dropped thank-you letters and cards.

“It makes me feel good knowing I can make a little difference in someone’s day,” Dana says. “You never know what someone is going through.”

Including that costumed someone on the corner.

Passersby see a happy eagle this day. They don’t see the woman whose life has turned upside down.

Around this time last year, Dana wasn’t feeling right. She couldn’t think straight. She couldn’t verbalize the words that seemed to flutter around her head, “like Tweety Bird,” she says. She couldn’t remember what day it was.

“I started getting really bad with my memory,” she says.

She started jotting things down in a notebook. She filled pages with happenings and dates, all leading up to Oct. 16.

“I saw my Dr.,” she wrote that day. “Said I have dementia early onset.”

Dana could only cry. She could only think of her great grandma and grandma and the way dementia changed them. Dana always visited her grandma in the assisted living home she required late in her life.

Late in life — that’s when dementia came, Dana always thought.

“I was scared to death,” she says. “It was like, is this the rest of my life at 54? I never thought at my age I could have this.”

Dementia in people younger than 65 has long been considered rare. But researchers have reported troubling trends in recent years.

In 2020, a Blue Cross Blue Shield Association report found early-onset dementia or Alzheimer’s disease increased a staggering 200% among insured Americans age 30-64 over a five-year study period. This year, the National Institutes of Health cited another study that estimated 42% of Americans older than 55 will eventually develop dementia. At current diagnosis rates, researchers calculated per-year cases to double by 2060.

“The study suggests that the lifetime risk of dementia may be much higher than previously thought,” the National Institutes of Health concluded.

Causes are still being understood, though genetics and underlying health issues are suspected. Like a cure, much about the disease is a mystery.

Notes specialists at Massachusetts General Hospital: “Some people decline quickly over a few years, while others experience a slower decline over a much longer period.”

That’s what scares Dana — the unknown.

She worries about leaving the oven on or forgetting something that could prove harmful. She worries about waking up one day and not knowing where she is. She worries about waking up and not knowing who she is. Worry becomes fear — fear of forgetting her husband, her kids, her grandkids.

She’s afraid of becoming something she’s not, sad and anxious, frustrated and mad. Dana doesn’t want her 12 grandkids to see her like that.

“I want them to see me happy,” she says. “I want them to remember their grandma being like that.”

And so she’ll keep decorating the front yard, filling it with inflatables year-round. She’ll keep dressing up in a blow-up costume. She’ll keep dancing.

“Sometimes I’m just in a lot of pain,” she says, “and those are the days where I’ve gotta go and make people happy and smile.”

The inflatables “gave her new purpose,” says her daughter, Megan. “It’s helped with the depression and sadness and giving her something to keep her mind off everything.”

A new purpose, but the Huff Holiday House has been close to a decade in the making.

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It started with an oversized Santa and snow globe. “I just started collecting them after that,” Dana says.

Christmas gave way to blow-up celebrations for Halloween and Thanksgiving and every festive occasion on the calendar. After the Fourth of July one year, Dana was deflating displays and returning the yard to its empty summertime state. A father and his little boy walked by, she recalls.

“He said, ‘You’re gonna ruin his day,’” she says. “So I didn’t take them down.”

The inflatables would stay, along with the strings of light across the house. The colors would change with the press of a button — red, white and blue for the summer, orange for Halloween, red and green come Christmas, green for St. Patrick’s Day, an array of pastels for Easter.

“Then she started getting random cards and letters from the neighborhood,” Megan says. “Saying how much they appreciated it, how much joy it brought them.”

Megan was reminded of the Chevy Chase “Vacation” movies she and her siblings watched growing up. “Our house became the Griswolds,” she says.

That wasn’t always the case. Not while the Army moved the family around, from Utah to Washington state, from North Carolina to Colorado Springs.

“With us moving around so much, it made it hard to settle down and put up much decorations,” Megan says.

It was harder to be without their dad for holidays.

Over his 22 years of service, Rich deployed five times, including multiple stays in Iraq during the height of war. Between the tasks at hand, his mind would drift to his wife and their three children she was raising alone.

He lived dual lives — one overseas and one back home, both challenging. “When you come home, you gotta get to know each other again,” Rich says. “I gotta fit back in being dad.”

He was all too aware of divorce rates among fellow soldiers. But the love he and Dana had as teenagers back in Kansas never wavered.

They’ve been married 35 years now. And more than ever during those active duty years, they learned to cherish the time they had.

“Because you never know when you’re gonna get deployed again,” Dana says. “You never know if something is gonna happen.”

Holidays took on new, greater meaning — symbolizing time lost and time to reclaim. That was the case after Rich retired in 2019. “It was like taking a rucksack off,” he says.

But there would be more weight to carry, at times unbearable.

Not long after Dana’s early onset dementia diagnosis, the couple was scrolling through the internet searching for support groups.

“It was depressing,” Rich says, “because everybody’s telling each other, ‘Put them in a home.’”

Dana was not alone — more than 6 million Americans live with dementia, according to the National Institutes of Health — and yet she has felt so alone and misunderstood.

A song made her feel less so. It was by Alfie Church, who last year was crafting a song every day in a mission to raise awareness and “combat dementia.”

Dana listened over and over: “Between reality and silence, moments slip by like whispers … Lost moments, like whispers in the night, gone in an instant, vanished from sight …”

Those were words Dana was looking for, words she has tried to find on blank pages. She keeps taking notes, combating dementia in her own way. “But how do you fight it?” she says. “You know it’s coming.”

She took pen to paper one defeated day last winter: “Pain is the new me.”

But she knows she can’t let pain win. Rich knows, too.

“The bottom line for us is, in life you go through a lot of struggles,” he says. “Now it’s time for us to try to make the world a little bit better.”

Now it’s time to step into the nylon talons. Dana fits her arms through the wings. Phone in hand for pictures to post on social media later, Rich follows the eagle out the front door. The grandkids are here.

Moments slip by, and this is another moment to cherish.