Let the Mountains Carry Me Home.

I am driving home to Boston from Vermont.  Deliberately, I've taken the long way, choosing the small routes over the interstate.  It will take me longer to get home, of this I am well aware, but it's no matter.  I am craving the quiet, cherishing the empty roads and the ability to let my eyes gaze across snowy open farmlands, the Green Mountains in the distance.  Scattered across the fields are the farms with their quintessential red barns and white farmhouses.  I watch to see which ones have smoke coming out of their chimneys, play a game with myself picking the ones that feel the most welcoming; deciding the places that would be most inviting on a cold winter night.

On a lark I stop in Middlebury to visit the Morgan Horse farm located a few miles out of town.  My phone/Google tells me it's off-season, that tours are only offered from May through November.  Still, I'd like to see the farm and two miles off my route seems an easy decision to make.  True, there are no tours, the gift shop is not open, and no one is manning the barn when I arrive.  The younger version of myself might have been worried about getting in trouble for entering the barn with no one around.  The current version of me is tired of worrying about inconsequential matters and without hesitation steps into the open barn door.  The smell of the barn, all hay and sawdust and warm horses at ease in their stalls on a sunny day, is a smell so clearly associated with my youth that I am nearly bowled over with memories, with longing, with remembering.    

I am grateful for this reaction; so very thankful for knowing this smell, these sounds, of intuitively understanding the workings of a barn.  What a thing to have running through my veins, what a gift to spend an hour alone in a quiet barn on a warm February afternoon, the only company these beautiful animals munching on their hay.

Back on the road I continue to make my way south, winding closer to several ski resorts; I am driving alongside the mountains that were previously in the distance.  The sun kisses these mountains as she sets, gently teasing them for a few moments with her brilliant golden rays before she ducks behind a cloud or drops herself lower in the sky, visiting a new pocket on the mountain.  I am driving the same jeep I have had for more than sixteen years, I am making my way home on roads that are at once familiar, passing mountains I have skied on - as a panicked college student who had only worn skis once before in her life, as a early twenty-something more focused on which cute boys were skiing than the mountains themselves, and in my mid-30s with girlfriends, fellow yogis who had opted for a weekend retreat of yoga and skis. 

I watch that sun, those mountains, and I am overwhelmed with a feeling I'm not sure I can verbalize.  It's gratitude, of course.  And it's amazement too.  Somehow I have been lucky enough to be living this life, to have been granted more beautiful moments than I can count, and now this - another one, as I watch this sun chase me home.

I am in awe.