Day 17: Utah

Once upon a time there was a girl who grew up in a great, wide valley. On summer days, the girl would walk along a road--a long, straight road, that was 3 miles each way. The road was lined with wild sunflowers that grew along the banks of irrigation ditches, running with cold, clear water. From this road, you could look across the entire valley, from the mountains on the east to the peaks on the north, and the rolling hills to the west. It was all framed perfectly, like a picture. Driving in a car, it would take 45 minutes to get to the point of the mountain that she could see standing on this road. The world seemed to spread out at her feet, like a quilt.

The mountains surrounding her had always seemed, since her youngest memories, to be comfortable, friendly sleeping giants. There were patterns in the forests on their slopes that she had noticed when she was very young, and she still couldn't see anything but a great fox with a bushy tail on one mountain; clusters of trees that looked like sheep marching up another.

All of these things were woven in her and around her like breathing, like living, like time itself. But the girl grew up, and she left the valley. She moved to a high plain that was windswept and cold. She moved to a pulsing city that sprawled and clawed and choked over hills to the edge of a cloudy sea. She drove in a car over a rise and saw a city of diamonds on an island rise up in front of her, so beautiful she couldn't breathe.

But always in her heart was the smell of wild sunflowers and yellows of autumn on aspen groves. And no matter where she went, her feet never found a road quite as straight. She could never see quite so far.