For the Love of Mountains

 

I remember when my brother Ron moved to Colorado and fell in love with the mountains and with Ruthie. (This was her Dad's cabin west of Denver.)

I did not have the same reaction the first time I was in the Rocky Mountains. I had a bad altitude headache the whole time I was there. It was winter. When I went back during the summer the elevation didn't bother me as much. 

Being in the Blue Ridge Mountains was an entirely different experience. I loved those mountains.

The same is true of the Santa Cantalina Mountains north of Tucson, AZ. 

I would happily go back to the Blue Ridge and/or the Santa Catalinas....to visit.

I am a plainswoman born and bred. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin-American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, expressed her view of mountains in a poem....

My Mountains

In mountains I grew up, 
three dozen peaks around me. 
I seem never, never, 
though I hear my steps departing, 
to have lost them, not in the day, 
not in the starlit night, 
and though in pools I see
myself with snowy hair, 
I never left them, they never left me
like a child forsaken. 

And though they might call me
runaway, deserter, 
I had them and I have them 
always, always. 
And their gaze follows me.