Home sweet home. As I get older I find cliches to be increasingly unerringly true. It was an indescribable feeling the night I woke up in my own bed after a couple of weeks away. Half asleep as I was, I had this unshakeable feeling that this was the loveliest, most wonderful bed I'd ever slept in, the most beautiful room I'd ever been in, the most blessed sleep I'd ever slept. Ever.
And it is always a beautiful time of year up here in these mountains. The rain and sticky heat is gone, and in its place comes stealing in what I call the sad soft feel of a year preparing to depart. A precious ambience I've come to associate over the years with oranges, dust, woollen clothes, cold nights, warming your back in the morning sun and ah, Christmas. And all the connotations of the year with its problems and difficulties doing a fast fade, and an anxious excitement for the new year to come in as if all the old year's problems will dissolve away with the last sunset. On the flip side, there's also the implicit realisation that all the year's good times and treasured memories will slide further away in time. Another year gone, another time was.
Time comes, time goes. Seasons change. People come and go. But these mountains are eternal.
