Yesterday I drove to Heber City with D to pick up an order for the shop.  We were on the road fairly early and I watched out the passenger window of the van as the landscape rolled by, feeling nostalgic. My coffee burned my finger but I didn’t really care.  I was more interested in the beauty I’d forgotten this part of the country can have. 

It’s different than the winters of Alaska, or Portland.  This land has a dogged determination of will exerted by the settlers for the last hundred and fifty years.  Farm land broken up by fields and crosshatched with the energy of generations of stories. 

It’s not the magical realm of possibilities like Alaska, where the land hasn’t been touched.  It’s not the tentative truce of the land around Portland and its human residents.  The land here is shaped and while that’s at once depressing it also contains a little bit of awe. 

It was one of those days where my mind went to far away places and lingered in other times.  I got home last night and cried.

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