Picture

At the end of a long school year in Utah, I drove myself back home to Oregon. As I descended into Oregon, into this canyon valley of greens that wound around hills and trees, I was happy to be coming home. There were rainbow rows of hills: brown hills, light then dark green behind, purplish rolls behind those, and dark blue mountains in the distance that looked like someone had spilled chalk dust on their tops. Yes, I'm obnoxiously trying to paint a picture here. There was something about being surrounded by beauty and then the immediate connection to all the feelings of coming home, to where you know places and people and maybe even yourself. I tried to write this paragraph in my head as I drove through this experience, trying to figure out some way to paint those same feelings for someone else, maybe let them be surprised by sudden joy the same way I was, and all that I can give you is the image of winding around rainbow hills. Some things don’t lend themselves to being packaged and frozen, ready to be pulled out of the freezer for thawing and reinterpretation. Some things are just themselves just once.