The Prelude

What's happening, what's made us what we are, living as if we're sitting on the porch waiting for the pies to cool, peach and blackberry?

Some of us chase history, as if we might be in it, and some of us, getting up from our chairs to fetch something from another room, forget the moment we reach that room why we have risen.

We play around in the thin air of our little hearts as long as we can, then rest a spell,
out of breath.

Chief Joseph could still be in the Beartooth Mountains for all we know, keeping his people a step or two ahead of the U.S. Military. From where we sit, it looks possible to walk into the wilderness and never come back.

On a summer day, at 10,000 feet, one of us is content to sit in the meadow for a little while and meditate on the hard geologic evidence from whence sprang the rocks and wildflowers as the other dwells on the poet Wordsworth, who worked on "The Prelude" right up to the end of his life.