When David was three, he had blond hair. One wouldn't know that now to see him, but I've been going through my slide collection and realizing more deeply why pictures of growing children are important to keep. This culling of slides helps me realize, though, that there are many photos that I didn't need to keep. For instance, a sunset that was just a slim band of red between dark clouds and dark ground on three slides and underexposed images that have nothing to impart. I'm keeping all the discards in a plastic bag, for the moment, maybe, in the end, just to show how many I culled. Or maybe because I'm not quite ready to say good-bye to all of them.
I had forgotten the ent tree. I first read The Lord of the Rings in college, 1968, and read it two more times in the decade following. If you've read it, you know of ents, and if you haven't, chances are you'll learn of ents when the second film, The Two Towers, is released. When my family purchased a piece of pasture with a hillside of thin woods in 1973, we found several older trees with their tops broken off. One was a maple and its branches were such that it became a dancing ent tree in my imagination. It was visible from the back windows of the house we placed on the woods/pasture edge, and I watched it often through the kitchen window.
A beech stub stood beside the house, shorter with thicker branches that held armloads of snow on an amethyst morning. Its broken-off branches and the barberry bushes and conifers surrounding it formed a bird haven.
Sunrises from behind Spruce Mountain's sister mountains to the north warmed the broad sweep of lower hills and river valley and tinted the thin fog on summer mornings. What luxury it was to be able to enjoy the beauty of the every day occurrences of the nature that surrounded me.
The Wolf Red apple trees in the field of the old farm next door were loaded with blossoms on a green grass May morning, and I remember Isabel Hall, its elderly owner, and her menage of too many sick cats which she tried to care for. 
The pond in front of her house was an eye to the sky, reflecting light and color in silver sheen, fed by the thread of a brook that ran through white cedars in our pasture.
The first home in Paul's Square, where a path ran through the woods …before the trailer park was built there … to the old railroad right of way that runs from Montpelier to Wells River. Along that path the deciduous trees became a color-splashed cathedral in autumn—far better than any human kind.
The few stands of poplar (aspen) that became "grey-arrowed copses" in the last gold shimmer of fall; tamarack (larch)—deciduous conifers that were truly the last fling of gold at the very end of October when all broad-leafed deciduous trees had lost their leaves. Tamaracks grouped themselves; like the poplar as they also grew from underground stolonifera—one plant being a whole colony of trees. They surprised me with little rosy flowers in spring among the fresh, green, soft-as-silk needles.
The sunsets and clouds from the upper field of Austin's farm fill slides by the hundreds. It was my joy to walk up to the hilltop where alfalfa and cornfields stretched wide and wait as the earth turned. One late June evening I sat on the edge of a field with my book, waiting. I thought there would be no color as the clouds were thick stratus and the sun had disappeared. Nine p.m. (I wore a watch back then) and still a grey skyscape. I read five minutes more, raised my eyes and discovered the sun, below the horizon, had found a gap in the clouds. The underside of every cloud across the sky was rose. It was magnificent!
The beautiful roses that Mom and Carol grew at the farm during the 70s remain vibrant still, even though the plants have long gone in reality.
We are told to let go of the past, to be always in the present. Yet, when the tickle of good memories comes through these images, I am blessed by the remembering.
