Paradise forgotten

Life's different up in the mountains. The air is completely, utterly different--as if you could smell things growing. The rocks under your feet extend perhaps for miles underneath--the mountains are as old as time and still growing, and all you have to come to terms with is an obstacle. The mountains can be exquisitely beautiful and extremely dangerous; ask anyone about lightning, and you'll see a dark look or a wild eye, a sudden shake of the head as if one could fend off the weather. The hillsides are rough and rarely verdant, not even in spring and never in summer, except when the wildflowers bloom. Everything turns to gold and eventually to white. The first snows are often in september, and they remain until May. Many places have three or four meters of snow, many roads are closed, many places inaccessible.



If you venture out, it's paradise. I could never have thought a world of one color could be so beautiful. The snow hides the roughness, the imperfections, leaving only the blurry outlines, the frozen hint of a lake that was and will be again, but itsn't now. A path could be a stream leading anywhere, the laden boughs comforting in their monotony, yet somehow disconcerting. You don't want to get lost, you don't want to sleep on the mountain.

Most of us only visit. We come, we wander, we take pictures, we leave. We remember, for those days when the world is far away and outside a window, what life is really like.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
--Robert Frost