One of my favorite things about flying in and out of Portland during the daylight hours is the amazing views you get of the Cascade Mountains. When my parents were first looking for a place to live that wasn’t Southern California, my mom had a dream about living someplace with a view of a mountain. Soon after we found ourselves in Portland.
On clear days, Portlanders don’t say comment on the cloudless sky, they simply say, “the mountain is out.” Growing up, whenever my sister and I would be in the car with our mom and she caught a glimpse of Mt. Hood, she’s say, “there’s my mountain.” It was as if it had called to her and she was lovingly bound to it.
I may have already mentioned that I wish we had mountains in Pennsylvania, but sadly we only have hills around these parts. (Though the mountains down in Virginia aren’t too far away.)
When my grandmother used to come and visit us in LA, she’d go on at length about how wonderful it was to have hills and mountains around. Having always had them, I didn’t really know what I was missing until I moved here. I still miss them, but obviously not enough to leave Philly.
My overwhelming reaction to a sight like a mountain or the view of the Grand Canyon or Sedona is that from a distance, they seem so stoic and unchanging, yet on a smaller scale they constantly change. Those small changes contribute to the beauty of the whole, and just as we as people slowly evolve, our small changes go unnoticed until they become so big as to have an effect on the whole, and our viewpoint changes. Either of the mountain or us, or our friends and family.
That’s what I was thinking.