Musings

[Blog] Mountains

It’s been just over six months since moving to Colorado, and the mountains still take me by surprise. They’re beautiful. So beautiful. Right now it’s usually right around sunrise when I drive in to work in the morning, and with all the snow that has fallen this winter the taller peaks are all still white with snow, and they turn a brilliant pink when the early sunlight hits them. Some mornings there’s towering clouds just beyond them, either penned in or held at bay. On others they’re half hidden in mist.

I can’t quite see them from the house; we’re just low enough, just tucked enough into the hills to hide them. Until I make that first turn onto one of the bigger east-west roads. Then they’re there, huge and impressive, so stunning they take my breath away.

When I lived in Santa Barbara, I felt almost the same way about the ocean. There’s this one big hill in particular where the road runs up it long and steep and curving, and when you crest it the Pacific is suddenly there, immense and beautiful, the waves a slightly different shade of blue and green every single day.

But I think, if I had to choose, I love the mountains more.


News from the Writer’s Den

As I mentioned at the beginning of this month, life went unexpected right at the end of January and is only slowly returning to normal finding a rhythm again, which took just as much of a toll on my still shaky writing habit as you’d expect. That being said, the good news is that I’m gearing right back up again and should be posting up the (much longer!) story I’d meant for January by the end of this month as well as making more progress on Tanner and Miranda’s various adventures. Ambitious? Maybe. But also doable. Either way, I’ll see you all next week with another new blog.

Musings

[Blog] Perspective

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I’ve always thought I lived in beautiful places. The area of northern Idaho I grew up in is full of rolling hills that are green in the spring and golden in the summer and fall. And then, as if that wasn’t beautiful enough, I went to college and worked my first job in Santa Barbara, meaning that I got to spend the next nine years in a city with mountains on one side and ocean and islands on the other. I’m a littler farther south now, in an area that’s drier and browner (now that summer is in full swing, at least) and not what I would immediately think to describe as a beautiful place. Not because it’s not, but because I’m used to a different sort of pretty.

But then I catch a glimpse of a desert sunset, the sort that covers everything in a wash of gold, the sort that somehow seems more vibrant when the first whisper of a cooler breeze come through, the sort that’s nothing like what I grew up with. And it’s incredible.