morning

The sun is just rising and outside my window, beyond the sea of roofs and street lights, I can see the outline of the mountains against the lightening sky. They look all shades of blue, jagged peaks in some places and rolling slopes in others. In all the world – or in the tiny parts of it I’ve seen – it is one of my favourite views.

I live on the same street I grew up on. It’s changed a lot – the older homes, like mine, replaced one-by-one with newer, bigger, shinier versions. When I was a kid, there was an overgrown, untamed piece of land as big as a city block right beside our house. We called it “the bush” and tucked right in its centre was a falling down house owned by a man named Jack. There was a path that led from the corner of our yard into the bush, and we’d hang out in there all the time, my brothers and I. They would play war, running through the trees with toy rifles slung over their shoulders. I would take my dolls underneath a big weeping willow and pretend that we lived there. Jack never told us to leave – at the time, it never occurred to me why he might. Looking back, I see the kindness in that.

It’s 7:30am now and the house is quiet and the sky is light and I’m wandering down trails through the past. My point is, I guess, that everything has changed. But I’ve been looking out the window at these mountains, with their very same peaks and slopes, for my entire life.

So not everything has changed after all.

Kids grow up and mama turns to mommy turns to mom (turns to “dude”) and bodies settle and jobs change and people come and go and I have so many passwords to so many things it makes my head spin.

But I like knowing that there are things that have been here before me, things that will outlast me. There’s comfort in that, in consistency. In mountains.

With love. xo