Wherever I go

For seven years I lived in the desert.  My husband took me there when we were first married. We arrived in the fall after the leaves had fallen, and my first view of the mountains looked like a barren wasteland.  People would say, "Aren't they beautiful?" and I would look at them, dumbfounded.  How could anyone say this was beautiful? I missed the lush rainforest, water everywhere, and most of all, my family; but I loved my husband and my home was wherever he was.  I felt that we needed to be there, but I didn't want to be.  I cried a lot in those days.  I was homesick in so many ways.  I felt the land and the weather were harsh, and well, mean- to me.  I took it personally,  I felt it personally.  I remember the winter wind rushing across the way and slamming into me, straight through my thick woolen winter coat.  It felt like a slap in the face, like I had been struck.  I felt knocked down a lot in those days.

But time has a way of acclimating one, and I very slowly adjusted to it.  I experienced real change in the seasons for the first time in my life.  My first sight of snow was a softly falling one.  It filled me with excitement and stillness, I had no idea what silence was until that moment.  In the spring I marveled at the profusion of colors and I picked wildflowers in the mountains, always wanting to stop and gather more and more. I marveled again in the fall, at the change in colors as the whole mountainside was set ablaze in fiery reds and golds.  I had never seen anything like it, but in books, and here I was standing in the midst of it.  It was beautiful and overwhelming and awesome to me.

 We took road trips down winding roads that we had no idea where they would end up, stopping whenever we felt like it, going as long and as far as we wanted.  We camped and fished and I tasted the "best steak ever", cooked over a fire, up a canyon, by a brook.  I liked bundling up when the air turned crisp and I loved the change I felt in the air, every time one season was about to emerge from another.

I know the pain of parting from what I love and is familiar, but I also know the joy of new loves and new familiarity.  I've been back on my beloved islands for awhile now, rejoicing in the present beauties.  But when our mild seasons shift, and I feel that change in the air, every once in awhile I get a hankering for tulips and lilies and crocuses, things that don't readily grow over here.  I remember the fruit orchards and the hay rides and the farmers markets with apple jelly.  I remember the magic of walking down Center Street in a lightly falling snow, bundled in a scarf and coat and thick boots, sipping cocoa, looking into the quaint shops and listening to the carolers.  Every place has it's wonders, and I've learned to appreciate them wherever I go.  By the time we left the desert, I could look at those mountains and with reverence say, "Yes, they are beautiful!"