Yes, I can.

[Note to anyone keeping track: as long as I am still awake, it's still my "day," and thus my post counts. By my rules, anyway.] 

A few months ago, when I was planning this trip to Idaho with my daughter and the two grandsons, I thought, "Am I trying to repeat something that was really great, just to repeat it? Am I not thereby courting disappointment?" It was a stray thought, an errant thought. I proceeded anyway. Whatever would be different would be different, I reasoned. And what would be good would be good, regardless of the fact that we had done it, or something very like it, before, and it was lovely then and I hoped it would be lovely again.

Well, it is lovely. Lovely again, and lovely anew.

It's a little like the same old places we almost always visit every time we come up here, no matter the cast of characters. Today, we took the boys to Mesa Falls. We always try to go at around 10:30 a.m., the time my father once told me was when you could count on the light catching the spray and forming a spectrum of light. A rainbow.

Every time I go, I try to capture that light, and something about the force of the water. I'm pretty sure that each time, I try to capture just about the same exact image. I remind myself: you're trying to capture pretty much the same exact image. But I do it anyway. The capturing is part of it--the attempt--but it's also, I guess, a way of seeing the beauty anew.

tuff

basalt

The places to which we return, we return to for a reason. For me, it's because what's there evokes feelings that matter to me. Something primary, something that feels original to me. I feel so lucky to be able to come back here--this place that is part of any sensible definition of home to me--and to have shared it with my grandparents, my parents, my siblings, my aunts and uncles, my children and now their children. So, so very lucky.