Your peaks were painted with snow yesterday. And for just a moment I stopped my work, stood outside and looked at your white laced mountain tops, and felt the same stirring I have felt each year, a yearning for the excitement of anticipation of the season. Primal and uncontrollable, yet still soft and deep enough no one ever really knows.

For how many years have I worked on our little piece of land here on your big broad mountain side and looked over my shoulder awaiting your leaves to put out your final fiery display and then blow off, taking with them the last of the summer tourists, leaving you here with me, unadorned, as we remain and near the stark white season, that which settles in and consumes, quiet and calms, allowing me to hear my breath in your winter winds.

And yet this winter will find me on a different hillside, a different mountain to cradle my fears and passions. A winter, hushed and sleepy and snowy, awaits me but in a new land, new places to explore, touch and tease me, unfold before me like lacy golden wings, delicately covered with frost in first light of an early winter morning.

But will I find wilds? Will I ever be embraced by the wilds that have surrounded me here for half the year? The solitude and silence have become me. I have identified myself more with the mountain than the people who come and go, and from both I step away. I will find them again, that which matters most, the wild places and spaces, elsewhere. Some of us belong somewhere just a little more wild. Or is it that perhaps we don’t fit in the other places.