The Mountains are Calling

We've tipped over the solstice and now roll downhill toward Independence Day, which always marked the unofficial end of summer's beginning—back when my kids were pint-sized swimmers with goggles too big for their faces and hair bleached pale from chlorine. The Fourth meant one more week of swim league, one more week until family vacation, and a prompt to schedule back-to-school shopping and medical checkups.

We're past that stage now. This year, the Fourth signifies something different: William's week-long company holiday and his return home to adventure in the mountains with us. Saturday we saw a mountain portrait captioned with John Muir's words: "The mountains are calling, and I must go." The phrase keeps circling through my mind, a siren song for cooler weather, leg muscles screaming through miles up of steep incline, panoramic views of the Rockies spreading endlessly beneath us.

But I'm reading something that throws a spoke into that wheel of anticipation. Via audiobook, I'm moving through The Correspondent by Virginia Evans—told entirely through letters, emails, unsent journal entries. Different voices and perspectives charm and beguile me, and the novel reminds me of my father's letters to my mother during his months in Vietnam. Letters, a lost art, reach the highest planes of literary expression in this book. I found myself longing for that form—the deliberate slowness of writing a letter, the care it requires, the permanence of ink on paper.

This morning, driving home from the pool, listening to the audiobook, I felt regret about not having letters from my own life. Then I remembered this blog—seventeen years of writing things down that might otherwise disappear. Not the same as a handwritten letter, but something. The mountains are calling. William's coming home. And somewhere in between, I'm writing it all down.