recognizing my nostalgia for the oak-shaded canyons and chaparral ridges, for even the river in flood and the western mountains obscured by haze, still missing the center.

what must it mean to remember, to form memories like mirages, a mirror of things past like the changing of the seasons: the fire season, the flood season, the wildflower season.

remembering that all this was once an inland sea, that these rocks, these igneous outcroppings, are evidence of some long ago eruption, sometimes a little knowledge of geology is useful.

nostalgia for a time that never existed, this valley, this canyon, this ridge where I am from, trying to tell you about the poetry of purple lupines, of barbed wire embedded in the trunk of an oak tree.