It seems that I have always loved the mountains. Perhaps the were something that played in my dreams as a child growing up in the flatlands... Perhaps they have simply always called to my heart, to my soul.
The mountains that Heidi grew up in, running wild and free among the goats. The family stories that I grew up listening to. The pictures of family in Norway.. ancestral homes built right into the side of mountains with green grass growing on their roof, ancestors standing in front of their mountain yards...
I hadn't realized how my heart longed for the mountains until now. Returning home from a visit of the flatlands where I grew up, I watched out the window of the airplane. The patterned fields slowly passed beneath me. I marveled at the hundreds of windmills strewn along in seemingly empty, and maybe unwanted, space. I watched as ripples started to appear in the land, the patterns of them fascinating me with their complex simplicity.
I was not prepared for the happiness, the pure joy that filled my heart when we came upon the first mountain range. Watching that fade and then build into the next larger range, until the entire window was filled with the craggy hills that I had spent the last seven years surrounded by.
I had cried as I left the flatlands of my childhood..as I left my mother and grandmother again. These were not the green hills that Heidi had run through, nor were these the green hills that my ancestors had built their homes in. These were the mountains of the southwest, painted in their own glorious shades of pinks, and blues, and reds. The colors of the sunset captured by the rock to be seen throughout the day or night. The colors that stayed even through the rain and fleeting clouds. Now tears filled my eyes again as I felt my heart, my soul, speak to me. They said, "These mountains are home."
