Out West

The morning sun tapped the purple domestic flowers alongside my house ever so gently and the lake below flickered where fish kissed the surface.  I have forgotten the name of those flowers, but I remember that the starts were a gift from a dear friend.  She, as so many others, has gone beyond the reach of this sun.  

You told me that something inside you understood the English language even as a small child when you spoke Tagalog and Spanish.   I watched something wash over you as we drove the Rocky Mountain Front.  “I know this place,” you said brightly.  “Though I have never been here…I have been here before.”

You asked me to pull over so you might photograph a pair of dark horses on a green pasture at the base of the Rocky Mountains.  Cloud shadows slowly roved across the grass as we stood there.  The scent of grass ascended all around us.

You told me that the same thing that made you understand English as a little girl made you understand the American West.  

Just this week the birthdays of our departed spouses passed.  Remember how we clicked our glasses of water together over trout and pearled barley and toasted them?  Never to diminish, that, no matter where the roads lead.

Today, the sun carried chickadees into the pines and filled the distant mountains with a deep blue color that might be an ocean in another place. 

But for today we are here.  Here, under this blue sky. 

Out West.

--Mitchell Hegman