On the short flight from Oklahoma City to Denver I read several chapters of Lotus Eaters and have to surgically differentiate the main character Helen from the very similar main character in another book I’m nibbling at, It’s What I Do. (By the way? I can’t wait to tell you about both of these books. Wow.) I eat a couple handfuls of dark-chocolate-almond-cranberry trail mix plus a small red apple and a full liter of cold water. It is nervous, happy eating, because that’s a whole lot of food for me at eight in the morning. Still, something tells me the energy will be well spent throughout the day.

I cannot stop smiling as I make my way from the landed plane to a speedy underground train and then to the baggage carousel and my shuttle rendezvous. Texts with Handsome and my firstborn make my heart soar. 

Just minutes outside the Denver airport I see the landscape is comfortingly familiar to Oklahoma. Patchwork fields and modest farmland dotted with barns and silos. Scrubby prairie grasses, ponds, and even tree rows gone wild with time. It’s all very normal looking until I realize that above all of this, it’s not traces of clouds and sun I’m seeing, but rather snow capped mountains. Nearly halfway up the dome of the cornflower blue sky, I stare at the teasing, white, fragile looking shapes. Just hanging there. Broken silhouettes of the peaks where summer can’t reach, suspended above purple and blue shadows too smooth and quiet to be real. I have to refocus my eyes several times.

More brackish water in my life. Driving on the divided highway through the familiar-feeling terrain toward a brand new place. Closer and closer to my girl, my first baby, and a group of stunning rocks where her own heart has found purchase. Away from my own very real home. The drive is a pleasant mix of the two for a while, and I pray thank you and prepare my heart. Then once more thank you. 

The whispers of the mountain range had been on our left for an hour, just a tenuous suggestion of a foreign land, but now we are turned toward them, facing their immensity, their colors growing sharper with every mile, their heft swelling and gaining a pulse. I catch myself feeling physically sad for the cars driving away. Leaving already? And I catch myself holding my breath.

I see purple wildflowers, five feet tall. A pair of muscular, glossy horses grazing in a field that could be one of our own. A long, thick grove of vaulted trees all leaved out in silver and dancing shamelessly with the very Oklahoma-like wind.

If you are born here, if you grow up with these mountains as your nursery walls, at what age do you first acknowledge their splendor? Then, at what age do you grow bored with them and need reminding? 

Now the feet of the giants are visible. Green and carpeted, knuckled with foothills bigger than anything I’ve so far considered a mountain. More silver trees, this time growing in perfect twin rows, flanking a narrow, unpaved drive, a lot like the great ancient oaks in plantations of the South. I see feathery green grass and every kind of tree, but mostly pine. Cabins or boutique hotels emerging here and there. Generous hidden meadows and colorful wildflowers. This impossibly serpentine road as we climb up up up and my ears pop.

I gasp audibly at the massive boulders spilled out everywhere. Tossed like powerful marbles, great and meaningful, shocking in their size and perfect roundness. Others are deeply gouged and creased by long gone water, and I make a wish that I can maybe carry scars so beautifully. 

Still climbing, still sprialIng upward, I drink in a wide view of nothing but conical Scoth pines. They are stacked in wallpaper rows and layers, greens and grays, a color scale advancing up the mountain that seems to have no top. 

My eyes are greedy for every detail.