A return. . .

Coming again to this state where I grew up hasn't been a going back, a repeat , or, even, a coming home, Nothing is the same, for I am not the same. Long ago I learned my home is where love is. It's not a cast of mountains or slant of plain, not an ocean moving ceaselessly into sunrise or sunset as the case may be , but a quietness within, warmed, furnished, gardened, and landscaped to infinity with affection that includes all in its scope, wherever it is.

No, this return has been a new facet to embrace in my sense of home. This return is not an outward location reclaiming me in a replay of childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood. Not that all the joys are gone! - but simply exploded, transmuted into new understandings, new depths, new lights, new views. Activities are different, searching deeper, stretching farther. Old friends are new, and dearer because of it; new friends are already-known.

The mountains are here but where, before, they were sitings of beauty to be reached for, backdrop in which to move, to play, now they are to know. Immensely and from within, with infinite rhythms like deep-drawn song welling out from, not into, one's heart, sound of shade and light, canyon and height.

Heard more than seen, sensed more than heard - above all, understood - the vast plains are here, galleons of clouds sweeping shadows before them. The sunrises and sunsets are here, Roman fires of morning and night. White ground-phlox, johnny-jump-ups, bluebells hide among the sagebrush in spring; tiny flawless horned toads separate themselves from pebbles beneath surprised footsteps in summer. October moons roll across the sky - the Great Pumpkin trailing winds and warnings of winter. Snows, feather sifted or flat-out blizzard blasts, come and melt or stay and freeze.

And the high clear atmosphere delineates all in crystal, stark and brilliant as revelation, the play of seasons, topography, horizons slicing into forever - every thing seen new, as thought.

Nostalgia is cobwebs, weavings of dust. But no cobwebs here! A return, yes, a repeat no! As seasons swing, bringing blessings never the same, as days come and days go, each morning newborn, so this place returns with deeper tones, wider views all new, home-held, within.