There and Back Again

Disposition: Tired and worried
Listening: I’ll Only Miss Her (When I Think of Her) - Harry Conick, Jr.
Reading: The Seville Communion
Watching: Tom & Thomas
Obsessing: Eduardo Noriega
Pondering: All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. (Anatole France)

I have a most pleasant memory of this place I stayed in Austria. The memory once in awhile pops into my head and brings a smile to my face. The year was 2001. My sister and I finally fulfilled a lifelong dream of seeing Europe for the first time. One of our stops was the Austrian Tyrol.

The memory starts with me standing in the balcony of our tiny room in Austria. I have just showered and getting ready to go to breakfast and be in the bus with my luggage by 6 AM or some ungodly hour like that, lest I’d be left behind which wouldn’t have been a bad thing. I am enjoying the smell of morning dew in the cold morning breeze and watching in awe a view filled with green trees and lush hills that must have definitely been Maria von Trapp’s inspiration when she sang about the hills being alive or about her heart wanting to beat like the wings of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees. That’s just how I felt at that precise moment and if I could sing and not look silly doing so, I’d have done so.

My sister and I say goodbye to our room. We take the short walk to the main inn where everyone else in the tour slept while we slept in Mama’s house having volunteered the night before to sleep at a room apart from the main house. On our way to breakfast, we pass by the town’s cemetery just as the bells from the nearby chapel started ringing. We pass by beautiful houses with lovely flower boxes hanging from their window. Kira, the inn keeper’s black St. Bernard and the inn’s one-man welcoming crew, wiggles her tail at us as if asking if we slept well. After breakfast we load the bus and prepare for a long but pleasant road trip to Italy.

And then, as our bus leaves the parking lot, I see one of the prettiest sights I ever did see — a multitude of cows leaving the barn with spots, cowbells, ribbons and all. One cow looked tired, a few looked chirpy and one tried to stray away from the group. They were all headed for another day of grazing in the sun and idle moments in the hills. I keep looking back at them as the bus departs and until now, I still remember how lovely that day started and how beautiful that experience was.