I see myself in the spring, sitting in a garden in the town, and I'm with a kind soul who I haven't met yet. The mountains are around me, I see them surrounding. they are always there. they are my new home, and nothing like my home at all.

They are a different soul, these mountains. They are deep green, when full of life, an ageless green and ancient. The green mountains of Maine do age, they age happily and admit to their helplessness against the withering changes of time. But these mountains do not listen to time; save for hour their mind grows and shifts and sees all around them at their height, they do not change. They are deep black and white capped in winter and the trees stand along their flesh like soldiers at attention, dutifully softening their form to make the ageless rock appear both immensely strong, immovable, mighty, and so dense with life that that life becomes a kind of fur.

The mountains are raising me now, and it is such a strange thing now that I can think for myself. It is not as if I am starting from scratch without a thought of my own; I moved far away from home to be raised by a new land, and willingly so, and now I am facing the oddity that is allowing yourself to be reared by something other than home. I will let it. I will let it. But I has not, nor will it be easy. I cannot so easily call fate family and second homes a guardian, though I admit that I give a little in both areas. I know fate, destiny, is family no matter what shape it takes, and that I will be passed from guardian to guardian until I reach the end and everything turns to static and the black. But it is very much like meeting an uncle whom I never knew existed before and learning to love him.

These mountains are so great, so vast, so absolutely surrounding me, that I feel as if I am in a bubble. I live in a bowl where the lip is the mountain's tops and the sky and the bottom is where I now live, looking up, always looking up at the bowl around me while I walk to class or to town to learn of life from books and life in person. What else can be said of them except that they are strange? They are kind, I can feel that. The only threat that comes from them is not having known them my whole life. The kindest people can seem to carry an underlying threat if they are strangers to you. But I will get to know them, or else I will just be passing through and will only ever know them so well. That, I think, if that were to happen, would be a shame. I would really like to know them just as I have known my mountains, the ones by the crystal lakes of my grandmother's home, the ones standing with stoic face towards the great and bitter cold Atlantic waves.

But, maybe to be strangers with my new mountains, the ageless green and the deep black, maybe to only know them so well is to know them in another way. One person can be seen in a hundred different lights, who they are to other people depends on what others see in him. Maybe I am only supposed to know these mountains to a point, but not to their points which touch the heavens from dawn until dusk, bringing the stars out with its windswept snow and its wavering trees. Maybe these mountains are only meant to be a mentor, family in their own right but firmly settled in their own private life that the student must never touch, nor teacher ever reveal. You would love them, but not like blood family, you would thank them for what they taught you, but not like you would someone you grew up knowing. It would mean more because the moment to thank them would be so fleeing. You will only know this for this one chapter of your life, and they'll be gone again into the shadowed edged beyond your sight, where all the people and things and events you are meant to know come and go.

Maybe this will be what my new mountains mean to me. Maybe they are only supposed to be a moment, a teacher in the grander college of life, and then they will be gone, or I will be. I will be. I know this. I will be gone. I will go one, and I find other mountains, or they will be replaced with skyscrapers, but I will be the one who leaves, and the mountains, just like the ones I left at home, they will be waving goodbye as I leave them. No mountain has ever left me, I realize, and no mountain is the same when I return. No. I am not the same when I return. And to know this, is to realize that growth, which is life itself, is the most painful and enjoyable thing to experience. I don't want to leave my mountains, but I do. I burn to leave and dash away to the next scene of my life, to where I find a new skin and a new me and I burn for it. I leave my mountains and I leave myself and I find new mountains and a new self. Life: in order to live it it requires you to give, to let things go, to die, in order to grow, or to live, at all.

My mountains are only a moment. I know this now. But they will be a good friend to me while I am here. They have been already. And I will only be a moment to my mountains, and they will find others to watch over, to teach. But, I will be good to them, and I will think of them, and they will think of me, and we'll talk. Mountains are only a moment, and a moment so am I.