There are places you miss like the face of a loved one…..I know this face. Years full of memories have attached it to my soul, so much so that it has become not just a place, but part of who I am. I see it and they all come flooding back like the mighty Merced that cuts a powerful swath through this valley.

If I close my eyes, I can feel the spray of this fall where one day near the top my hat took flight. And leaning over from the guard rail I saw it perched on a ledge below. The wind caught it again before my Dad could rescue it because he almost went. The wind was God that day.

And here is where the coyote trotted through, meandering one day in the hush of a quiet morning. I stopped still and watched him, a living prayer on noiseless feet in his space, in his element, not mine.

And this…….as we walked along the meadow. I had been here for years and never chanced to see this splash of pink. A day in early May when we walked in that dreamlike place. How many years have we walked this meadow and wondered aloud how it would be to live there in one of those little enchanted houses…….as close to Heaven as we would wish for here.

I remember how happy Lauryn was when “Blackie” came out to greet us there on our walk…….there in that frozen time.

Heaven has hoses……and though I smile when I see these, my heart aches, my throat swells with lost time. Yet even so, my heart rests in hope knowing I will be in that place again someday, and maybe soon.

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. 1 Corinthians 13:12

I regret not having my good camera yet that year when we visited Yosemite, but I am glad I got these.