A View from the Mountain

On a scorching hot day last August, my husband David and I decided to get out of the house for a while after being cooped up trying to avoid the heat as much as possible. We set out on one of our favorite day trips which consists of a drive up to the small town of Hamilton, Georgia to eat a Blimpie’s sandwich then on to Pine Mountain for a look off Dowdell’s Knob. The highest point in Harris County, famous as the spot where Franklin D. Roosevelt often picnicked on his visits to nearby Warm Springs.

We got out of the car and took a seat on a large rock under a tree. Temperatures in recent days had soared to more than a hundred degrees, but up on the mountain, it was a comfortable eighty-five. As I stood looking out over the valley below us dotted with shadows from the occasional clouds overhead, I thought of all the other times I’d been there studying the exact same valley that FDR viewed on his escapes to the Knob. Years before kids, with kids, and after kids. Spring, summer, winter, and fall. So many season of life come and gone. Whatever else had changed, the one constant was that we were there together. David and I.

As with any other couple, there have been good times and hard times. Times where the landscape has fallen into shadow. But the shadows move on. From the view of the bird’s eye, I can see that they drift by more quickly than it seemed when I was standing under them. The sum of the good days has been far greater than the sum of the bad. This day was a good one where the laughter came easily and often. I’ve learned not to take days like this for granted.

Driving home with his hand in mine, the disappointments and missteps became obscure in the rearview mirror as Love once again wiped the slate clean. I found anew the certainty that we were made to take this journey together.

I’m not sure you can ask for much more in life than shade and a cool breeze on a hot summer’s day. Laughing and holding hands, the clouds behind you and the road that leads home stretched out before you is a treasure indeed.

Dowdell’s Knob in the fall