rocks

My Fridays are light, so I like to spend the open hours in the rocky green hills. It's a cool, sunny day and I'm seated in the front yard of what must have, at one time, been a charming little country house with a broad patio and lovely views of the olive groves, the village, and the Castellar. Now it's all mossy stucco and grassy floors, the uneven stones of its thick walls exposed and sprouting flowers, its roof disappeared and its windows collapsed, but the birds still love it, and I suspect it was a happy place.

I've come to love the mountains, the Pyrenees and the Andes and the Irish cliffs, but even (or maybe especially) the humble little ones like those that compose this forgotten Spanish sierra. I spent my childhood on the flat expanses of the Midwestern prairies, where you can see miles of corn and rest assured that, were you to traverse those miles, you would encounter still more corn. It's gorgeous in its own way, but I love the mystery of a mountainous horizon, where the peaks fade until their blue contours are indistinguishable from the sky, where the distance is inscrutable.