Longing

A scene like this leaves me longing not so much for spring and summer, with the warmth and color they bring, as for my first mountain friends--the men who stop to knock over every dead tree with all their might and the women who quietly wait for them, knowing that many a patient moment and photograph will later be spent on the wildflowers. (Beauty demands documentation.) Many friends are scattered far and near, not likely to be re-united so much in the future as they were in the past.

I long, too, for the hills of another country, where all my mountain friends from the first to the last will traipse about without a care nor a worry that mountain creatures might harm or hinder their delight. We've felt for a long time that we belong there more than we belong here, anyway.