Remembrance of mountains past

Last Saturday, after we had delivered cars to people and run some errands, we had some lovely late afternoon time with Rolf and Kristy to just sit around and bask in the presence of mountains. Austin has some nice rolling hills and the west-ward sweep of the Hill Country for hundreds of miles west is great, but I sometimes miss having some big mountains on the horizon.

Sandy tells me of an essay written about Utah by Ed Geary, called "The proper edge of the sky," talking about how one gets used to seeing a horizon of a certain shape, particularly when it is dramatic as Utah's is.

The first photo here shows Rolf and Kristy, sitting across from Sandy and me, by an irrigation canal at the edge of a park near where we used to live in Provo in the mid-1990s. The canal itself brought back many memories. When I was young in Idaho, irrigation canals were a big aspect of life. Our farm was across the street from a river bed that had been turned into a large controlled canal for delivering irrigation water to the farms around. And our own farm was crisscrossed by several medium sized canals and a bunch of smaller ditches to get water to fields, pastures, orchards and a large vegetable garden. We swam in them, explored them, worked with them to get the water flowing. I learned the magic of how to get water flowing through a large siphon tube with a few careful flicks of my hand. So the canal-ness was magic all by itself.

Not to mention the mountains showing the proper edge of the sky. It looks like we may well be in Austin for the long foreseeable future, which is exciting for work, music and all kinds of things, but I miss the mountains.

The next photo shows Sandy, Kristy and Rolf, standing at the edge of the hill we used to live on in Utah, Grandview Hill in Provo.
Remembrances of things past can be sweet indeed, particularly when you get to see them again, now and then.