Zion

I just looked at pictures taken at Zion National Park today that featured Rob, Grandma Elwyn, Uncle Marty and Aunt Joan (the photographer). The jagged red rocks are lightly coated with snow and clouds. They reach up with abandon as if the river below them were a world away.

Enter Dietrich, for whom bedtime seems a world away (though not for his parents who see it is nearing 8 pm). He is singing and tapping on the dishwasher (at my knees): "Sunrise on the iceberg, all day long, until the moon comes up, Sunrise on the iceberg, all day long and then night comes and then the moon shows up - a dun dun dun - Sunrise on the iceberg all day all day long boom boom!" He goes on (and is now singing in the bathroom upstairs to Elliott and Ryan): "Airplane full of food, don't know what this was, it's a cardboard plane. An airplane full of food, it's an airplane full of food with nothing in it. Well I don't know why it's an airplane full of food, but I don't know why, Airplane full of food.".

Back to what I was saying about those mountains? Well, how can I top a sunrise all day long and an airplane full of food (is there any food on airplanes anymore?).

The mountains...one picture is of Rob by the muscley tree where Ryan and I had our engagement picture taken during a Utah trip with Joan and Marty in 2003. The tree looks just as strong now as it did then. It's lowest branch reaches out before going straight up like it is flexing its bicep to the mountains above. I was reading about famous Wisconsin trees and there is folklore that the trees with abrupt bends in their lower branches were shaped that way by native Americans and settlers to mark a trail. The limbs were pulled down when young and as they grew made an 'L' shape. Rob stands stoically by the tree, though I'm sure the day's hiking had plenty of laughter. Marty struck a "Carol" pose on a rock (did Rob let him get there first?) and I'm sure Joan recounted the hostess, Joy, who pretended there were no tables available. We had been hiking most of the day. It was almost two p.m., no tables, really? Joan somehow got past Joy and found us a table. How we were overJoyed-jokes followed for the rest of the day.

Grandma Elwyn looks especially relaxed in the pictures. When I told my Grandparents I would be making my first trip to the Rockies in the spring of 1994 I remember Grandma's face lighting up. "I just love the Rockies," she'd said. It had never dawned on me that someone who had lived in Wisconsin the whole time I knew her could have a fondness for another place. I brought her back a candle that she still has on a window sill. But tomorrow she comes back to Wisconsin. Her time in the Rockies this year has rejuvenated her and given her a new lease on life. I can imagine it will be hard to leave the desert where flowers are blooming and grass keeps living through the winter. Back here the snow has turned to rocky ice. Yesterday my eyeballs were cold. Not even in Northfield have I experienced that. But maybe Grandma will bring back with her some of the awe of the red cliffs of Zion and some of the tenaciousness of the desert. And soon, or at least in three months, it will be spring.