December daily: Beautiful place

[resonant]

krait prompts: What's the most beautiful place you've ever been?

I wish I'd traveled more, honestly. But I love Point Reyes National Seashore, in northern California, where there are cliffs out over the Pacific Ocean in the fog, tidepools with giant puffy starfish and the occasional little tiny octopus, and gratings built into some of the roads to stop the sheep from getting out the way the cars get in.

I used to live in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I love them, too, but because I lived there my memory is less postcard-like (compared to my memory of Point Reyes) and more multisensory. I love the faintly acidic smell of a whole lot of rhododendrons and pine trees in a small space, and the way streams hiss running over wide flat rocks, and the hummingbirds that came and perched on my clothesline and were about the size of clothespins, and the taste of the water sweet from the tap and so cold that sometimes in summer it fogged up the chrome of the faucet.